Is the largest electronic health record vendor in the United States using restrictive noncompete agreements to kneecap its employees and monopolize the market?
Epic is an extremely abusive employer. I graduated from nearby UW-Madison from the Computer Science department and this is well known among students there. The smart ones know to stay away from Epic.
They require 50-60 hour work weeks with seemingly large salaries, although per hour it's much less than the average software developer salary in the area. You're pretty much a slave until you inevitably burn out after a year or two. Their model is preying on young undergrads who don't have much money yet, so I'm not surprised they have such an insane non-compete agreement.
I've personally known many former Epic employees at jobs I've had, so it's alarming that these people may be still barred from so many jobs in the area.
I think Epic is known for average salary but then you work there for a while and get some Epic certifications and then you leave to make 3x as an “Epic consultant” charging through the nose for implementations in hospitals.
Part of the problem is that once you're Epic-trained and Epic-certified, you're basically not qualified to work with anything else. Epic's software stack is so specific that it just doesn't translate to other sorts of work. I used to do tech screens for a consulting company in Madison and we'd get lots applicants trying to get into corporate IT but who had zero experience with any of the major required stacks - no standard RDBMS systems or query languages, few modern OO coding standards, etc (they do a LOT of their business logic in their weird Cache-based "query" language). While that seems to have improved a bit (they seem to have finally ditched most of their VB6 stuff) we're still stuck with a lot of tech talent out there that would expect to work for a senior IT developer salary, but has senior developer skills only applicable to a market they're legally prevented from working in.
That said, if you can handle the "Epic Culture" you can do pretty well there. A friend of mine found a very specific niche early on, and has been there for over 20 years, which is pretty unheard of. But I also know literally _dozens_ of people who lasted 2-3 years and changed careers entirely.
Epic is an extremely abusive employer. I graduated from nearby UW-Madison from the Computer Science department and this is well known among students there. The smart ones know to stay away from Epic.
They require 50-60 hour work weeks with seemingly large salaries, although per hour it's much less than the average software developer salary in the area. You're pretty much a slave until you inevitably burn out after a year or two. Their model is preying on young undergrads who don't have much money yet, so I'm not surprised they have such an insane non-compete agreement.
I've personally known many former Epic employees at jobs I've had, so it's alarming that these people may be still barred from so many jobs in the area.
I think Epic is known for average salary but then you work there for a while and get some Epic certifications and then you leave to make 3x as an “Epic consultant” charging through the nose for implementations in hospitals.
Part of the problem is that once you're Epic-trained and Epic-certified, you're basically not qualified to work with anything else. Epic's software stack is so specific that it just doesn't translate to other sorts of work. I used to do tech screens for a consulting company in Madison and we'd get lots applicants trying to get into corporate IT but who had zero experience with any of the major required stacks - no standard RDBMS systems or query languages, few modern OO coding standards, etc (they do a LOT of their business logic in their weird Cache-based "query" language). While that seems to have improved a bit (they seem to have finally ditched most of their VB6 stuff) we're still stuck with a lot of tech talent out there that would expect to work for a senior IT developer salary, but has senior developer skills only applicable to a market they're legally prevented from working in.
That said, if you can handle the "Epic Culture" you can do pretty well there. A friend of mine found a very specific niche early on, and has been there for over 20 years, which is pretty unheard of. But I also know literally _dozens_ of people who lasted 2-3 years and changed careers entirely.