8 ms·

Visiting Us

139 points by tobr 2y ago

simonebrunozzi 2y ago
Side note: the real Verona seems to me much, much better and nicer than the one in the US, or the Epic campus.
- Taikonerd 2y ago
  C'mon, next you're going to tell me that Paris, France is nicer than Paris, Texas!
pavlov 2y ago
Epic used to be a heavy user of the legendary/infamous MUMPS programming language. I wonder how much that’s still being actively developed. This 2007 classic explains how a case of MUMPS progresses when you’re a programmer: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/a_case_of_the_mumps https://thedailywtf.com/articles/a_case_of_the_mumps
- maxwelljoslyn 2y ago
  Epic is still a heavy user of that language at the lower parts of its stack, but there are other, friendlier/more modern languages in pretty widespread use too. Depends on the team & sub-application.
- epmatsw 2y ago
  The state of MUMPS has progressed a lot since this article was written, to the point where most MUMPS developers would probably only vaguely recognize this. Even the "MUMPS" they were using back in 2014 or so was really a higher-level dialect + higher-level framework (Chronicles) that was transpiled down to actual MUMPS. It was more like writing ES2015 + JSX or whatever and then actually executing ES3 + DOM operations. Source: was on a team that was performance sensitive enough that I spent a lot of time in the actual transpiled MUMPS code that did look more like this article.
- DaemonAlchemist 2y ago
  Having worked at Epic on Mumps code, I am almost certain that article was about Epic.
  - brokensegue 2y ago
    Does anyone else use mumps?
maxwelljoslyn 2y ago
Ayyyy, my day job is on HN. The campus is indeed cool, and I like working here (though I haven't been here nearly as long as some people!) If anyone's interested in Epic and wants one employee's opinion, my email's in my profile.
jbentley1 2y ago
I'm guessing somebody was listening to the latest episode of Acquired?
- azhenley 2y ago
  Objectively the best podcast. https://www.acquired.fm/ https://www.acquired.fm/
- theturtle32 2y ago
  From their episode description: "What if we told you that the person who started, runs and owns this establishment has legally ensured that it will never be sold, never go public and never acquire another company?" We DESPERATELY need more companies to structure themselves like this.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - crabmusket 2y ago
    It is really interesting to hear how this was a competitive advantage for them, and certainly a product advantage. The comparison between Epic (one database for everything) and Cerner (result of like 20+? acquisitions/mergers, patchwork of systems) around the Kaiser deal puts it in stark contrast.
    - odyssey7 2y ago
      Why is “acquisition” a bad word at Epic? Is it because the workers at a normal company would jump ship if Epic’s culture were imposed? If companies like Cerner, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. are all able to acquire and integrate software that was initially developed by others, why not Epic? Surely Epic is not less competent?
      - weitendorf 2y ago
        Epic has a pretty unique way of doing things in corporate america (maybe not that unusual for big tech companies, but very unusual for healthcare and general corporates) and I think acquisitions would cause them a lot more trouble than they'd be worth. For example, Epic has one giant HQ campus where they do actual-allhands in giant auditoriums and a really extensive training program with onsight classes and IIRC an entire massive building for it. Technically speaking I think they see buying software + changing it to be more like Epic (or continue to operate/develop/support it independently) as a waste of money when they could spend that time/money on improving what they already have. I also think it's probably a branding/marketing promise to their customers that if you buy Epic software, you're not going to have that contract morph into one with some other generic corporate company who causes problems trying to integrate/migrate your setup. Nor will you have wallstreet begging Epic to juice their customers for all their worth just because they might get away with it and it'd make the stock look good temporarily. (I have no idea how expensive Epic is comparatively but I do know EHR is very difficult to migrate from and Judy is known for playing the ultra-long-game). I think basically the idea is that acquiring another EHR vendor would only be for the benefit of expanding Epic (the company) market share but detract from making Epic's software a better product for their customers.
minimaxir 2y ago
I interviewed at Epic for my first job out of college a decade ago: while the campus is indeed beautiful, the sense I got was that they were trying to emulate Google's quirkyness while offering much lower salaries (but still relatively good given the CoL) and a less exciting product domain. I'm not sure how well that quirkyness appeals to prospective applicants in 2025.
- tmiku 2y ago
  My small liberal arts college sent a lot of people to Epic (3-5 grads out of each year's class of ~550), including me - they are known for hiring lots of fresh grads with academic-STEM backgrounds who lack tech industry experience into their technical services and QA roles. I think the hiring dynamics for those non-developer technical roles are more favorable to Epic than those for full developers, and those people tend to make up more of a company's headcount overall.
- NoTeslaThrow 2y ago
  Everything I've heard from word of mouth has been absolutely negative. Of course this has to be taken with a large rock of salt—who knows how reliable or representative this is—but five very negative reviews feels like it's on the unpopular side of the employer market in tech. I get the sense they're slightly less disliked than Meta or Amazon.
BeetleB 2y ago
Ah yes. The company that wanted to know my SAT and GRE scores, and then required me to do a personality profile quiz before rejecting me (did not even get to the entrance exam, which I was looking forward to). Still, I heard working there was quite good. Obviously not FAANG level salaries, but after you left and completed the 1 year non-compete, other health care companies and/or hospitals would pay a good premium for your MUMPS expertise. (None of the above is sarcasm, BTW)
hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
My first post-college job! Nothing but good things to say about it, all my colleagues were whip smart at what they did. I especially liked the interview process, where I had to do a couple of standardized tests online to prove I was in the top x% of test takers. Given that I had to lock down a full time job as fast as possible after college it was a real time saver to just be able to demonstrate objective general competence like that and move right on to the interesting stuff.
- starfezzy 2y ago
  > take an IQ test, skip the BS, work with highly intelligent people This is the way.
DoctorOW 2y ago
As a patient, I seek out MyChart because it's really well put together from my perspective. I've no idea how medical professionals and administrators feel about it, but personally I've had a great experience. I saw someone from Epic was here, so I just wanted to say keep up the good work :)
- brickfaced 2y ago
  I've been told by doctors and nurses that using Epic sucks, mainly because you're doing constant data entry while trying to listen to and care for patients, but that it's still far better than using any of Epic's competitors.
  - justlikereddit 2y ago
    Everything is 'tech-person trying to "simplify" entry, into big buttons' Imagine the Idiocracy healthcare scene. But now you have a menu Diving system within a dense jungle of ten million options. I've never had to click through so many steps to get something very simple done. And I've never had so many completely useless features available The system is also built for the American healthcare system, but they also sell it to Europe with deceptive practices, with no simplifications whatsoever regarding the less overbearing legal landscape. As an end user: it's a shit experience to use no matter what you end up using it for, the price tag is an Astronomical Unit but the support you get for that is everything but stellar
    - olejorgenb 2y ago
      In Norway, the Epic system has been a big scandal with insane budget overruns and doctors/nurses protesting against the rollout
      - jukkan 1y ago
        Exactly the same story in Finland.
- catgirlinspace 2y ago
brickfaced 2y ago
Epic is known locally as an exploitative, abusive employer of software engineers. Work-life balance is poor, pay is mediocre for the industry, and skills with their in-house tools don't transfer outside Epic. They have an extensive non-compete clause with EXTREMELY aggressive enforcement: https://isthmus.com/news/cover-story/opportunity-lost-epic-noncompete-list/ https://isthmus.com/news/cover-story/opportunity-lost-epic-n... They're also vehemently opposed to remote work, to the point that during COVID they tried to force employees back into the office in August, 2020 (!) in violation of a county public health order (!!!): https://www.wpr.org/economy/workers-officials-urge-remote-work-epic-seeks-bring-people-back-office https://www.wpr.org/economy/workers-officials-urge-remote-wo... Epic's Glassdoor reviews are terrible. Several personal friends each lasted less than a year at Epic out of college before finding new, better-paying employment elsewhere. Since Epic is privately owned and its founder and CEO has stated she'll never sell, its corporate culture will never change. It's better than no job at all but if you have other options, avoid.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mf_tomb 2y ago
  This is just totally untrue, Epic is fine as a Dev. I have many friends who work there, none of them work more than 40 hours a week and they all make ~200k with 5 yoe. Great for Madison WI. Tech stack does suck, however.
  - brickfaced 2y ago
    Glad your friends' experiences are exceptional. I know a woman working for Epic in the Madison area who miscarried due to work stress. Madison housing is also a lot less affordable these days, assuming you want to actually live in Madison and not a copy-paste Verona suburb w/ zero walkability: https://captimes.com/news/madison-home-prices-increased-the-most-in-the-nation-study-finds/article_5a46d632-4246-5907-8086-f9c9ced5b548.html https://captimes.com/news/madison-home-prices-increased-the-... And living in Madison means commuting to Epic in Verona, which means contending with Beltline traffic just as bad as 280 during rush hour.
neckardt 2y ago
My first job out of college was working at Epic on MyChart. Great people, terrible code. Epic’s main problem is a lack of clear internal code ownership. Everyone owns all the code. This means that even if you clean something up, someone on the other side of the company may come in and mess things up again. This led to really defensive programming where developers would never refactor, they would simply add a new if case for their new functionality somewhere deep in the code, then prop drill the data down. This led to every core function having over a dozen parameters and hundreds of branches. It eventually became impossible to reason about. Cross team calls were just function calls rather than defined apis. This made it fast to develop code initially, but terrible to own long term. This mainly applies to their Mumps code. While I was there I felt like Epic was beyond saving, but with a big push there may be something they can do: 1. Enforce some level of code complexity. Best practice is 40 lines per function and no more than 4 parameters per function. Epic probably shouldn’t shoot for that, but a 100 line limit and 6 parameters per function would already be a huge improvement. 2. Enforce strong code ownership. Epic has many people who are there for life, let them cook. Epic should segment off code to certain teams so those owners can fix it at their leisure. Cross team api calls should be clear API contracts. It would require some more discussions to get feature requests approved since not everyone can do anything anymore, but the code would gradually improve. Epic is too important to fail. I hope things have started to improve since I left.
- aylmao 2y ago
  What languages is their codebase developed in?
  - jacinda 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
    - LorenDB 2y ago
      Since HN elided the URL to just the first M, I was hopeful (in a perverse sort of way) that the URL would point to Malbolge.
lvl155 2y ago
The fact that Epic remains the best available solution in healthcare is quite sad. That entire industry is rotten to the core.
- zarathustreal 2y ago
  It is indeed rotten, it’s a power struggle from the start. Power corrupts absolutely
- zdragnar 2y ago
  The difficulty isn't the product itself, but all the integrations. Every small clinic wants special custom formats. Insurance eligibility providers will lie about their abilities. Some insurance companies don't integrate with any eligibility check software. Sending health info anywhere requires yet more interchange formats. The actual note taking bit isn't too bad, and can be easily modeled with most flexible CMSs even. The problem is that you can either gamble on a startup offering everything that a company that has been in business since before you were born and actually being able to follow through, or you can just go with the established company like everyone else does. Having seen several startups trying to break into the space, it's no surprise that epic still dominates. The regulatory hurdles alone are not trivial; clinics that take Medicaid are usually required to use an EMR with a CEHRT certification which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to obtain.
- undefuser 2y ago
  Why is it sad, are their products not good?
  - pacoWebConsult 2y ago
    It's a very complex system. Implementations cost hospital systems on the order of tens of millions of dollars. They have a near monopoly in the market. 2023 revenue was almost $5B [1] 1: https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/ https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
1oooqooq 2y ago
so, how much lower than California are the salaries in Wisconsin?
- shigawire 2y ago
  Less than you'd think in Madison, WI - but still crazy lower CoL than the bay for sure.
mikestew 2y ago
Must every company in the Midwest use a cow theme in some manner? Staff use cow bikes, cow carts, or cow vans to mooove across campus. It was cute when Gateway did it, still cute when FatCow does it (it is in their name), gettin’ a little cringe for the late-comers, though.
- lapcat 2y ago
  This is Wisconsin, the dairy capital of the world. We literally have cows at the state capitol: https://www.channel3000.com/video/cows-on-the-concourse-kicks-off-dairy-month/video_b989ecdd-89b9-5bab-9025-f643d42a61f8.html https://www.channel3000.com/video/cows-on-the-concourse-kick...
  - travem 2y ago
    Surely the dairy capital is California? They out produce Wisconsin by a significant margin - https://wisconsinwatch.org/2023/02/does-wisconsin-produce-more-milk-than-any-other-state-2/ https://wisconsinwatch.org/2023/02/does-wisconsin-produce-mo...
    - lapcat 2y ago
      Well, Wisconsin is #1 in cheese production and was #1 in milk production until the 1990s, still #2. If you take milk and cheese together, I think the historical nickname "America's Dairyland" continues to be applicable, especially considering the importance of dairy to Wisconsin's economy compared to California.
      - doodlebugging 2y ago
        >and was #1 in milk production until the 1990s, OT for this interesting discussion about Epic but one of the reasons that Wisconsin slipped to #2 in milk production back in the 90's was that northern tier milk producing states instituted stronger environmental protections back in the 1980's forcing changes in how animal waste in huge dairy operations had to be managed. At the time there was a lot of pollution due to runoff of waste into creeks and rivers causing a cascade of problems with water quality downstream of these huge dairy operations. A large number of these operations, instead of complying with the new environmental rules that would force better waste containment simply looked around the country for areas that had less strict requirements, lower enforcement, and an established dairy industry. Many of them ended up moving to counties in north central Texas and buying up large tracts of cheap land. They shipped their herds south and went on about their business down here just as they had up there. Erath County became one of the state's largest milk producing counties as a result of this migration. Texas has been a cattle state for generations but most of the larger operations were traditional ranches of 10's of thousands of acres with lots of open land where cattle herds were measured based on # acres/cow metrics. Feedlots where cattle were fattened just before slaughter were the only places where you had large herds crammed into a small area. The dairy industry bought much smaller properties, up to several thousands of acres, and their dairy herds were crammed into these smaller spaces with the wastes being largely allowed to run off into creeks and rivers. It took years before Texas stepped in to try to get a handle on the agri-waste runoff pollution of their rivers and many large rivers in the state still have contamination issues. Not coincidentally, this same issue affected swine operations in the US causing concentration of pig farms in North Carolina due to lax regulations.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Is there some significance to this page other than the funky cow theme/elaborate travel guide?
- viccis 2y ago
  Doesn't seem so. All the comments are just litigating whether Epic is a good place to work. Not sure the point of it other than to try to get people to work there or not work there.
- shigawire 2y ago
  There was a recent episode of the Acquired podcast talking about the company. For it's relatively small size it plays an outsize role in the US healthcare sector. So in the same way ASML is an interesting business due to its niche role, this is similarly... Though with lower stakes
- rgreasons 2y ago
  They employ a lot of software developers and it’s a very unique campus. I considered it well worth the click.
amendegree 2y ago
I see jobs posted for epic all the time, I just have no interest in relocating to Madison and they are vehemently against remote work
- throwaway96248 2y ago
  They abuse LinkedIn, and probably other job sites, marking their jobs as remote or in different locations, even they all require relocation to Madison, to improve visibility. It's annoying and suspicious. I reported it to LinkedIn.
  - shigawire 2y ago
    I'll defend them here and say there really is no good way on LinkedIn in to reach candidates across the country who might relocate... Unless LinkedIn changed recently. The posting are pretty up front about that requirement too, it's not like that is sprung on the candidate after they apply.
  - odyssey7 2y ago
    If you notice a company lie while recruiting you, when should you expect them to start being truthful or fair? What other lies might await the candidate?
b0rbb 2y ago
I consulted with Epic once and got to visit the campus. Incredible place, super detailed, and I loved the cafeteria setup they had (great food too.) I definitely got a feeling that folks got burned out pretty quickly though.
ivraatiems 2y ago
Like many here, I worked at Epic just out of college and left after a few months. Everything others have said is true. I call the campus "Disneyland for sad people," because it's gorgeous, but also totally artificial, and nobody is happy. The one great thing Epic did for me was get me to Madison, WI, an amazing city of great people where I found a much better job and stayed for many years. I still miss it sometimes.
overgard 2y ago
Funny story about a visitor to a game development office. About 8 years ago I was working on a mobile game where you could purchase specialized dragons and eggs. Some of these could be pretty expensive, but since they were high end items we wrote special GPU shader code for them so they had cool special effects on them. We tested these as well as we could -- we had a room with maybe 100 or so mobile devices -- but of course we couldn't test on everything. One day an irate older lady came to our office, and our receptionist for some reason let her in (probably thinking old lady = harmless?). Keep in mind our office was unlisted because we didn't want fans dropping by. She had driven all the way up from Arizona to Colorado (although I don't think it was the only reason she drove up), and she accused us of ripping her off, because she had bought one of these fancy dragons and instead of getting what she saw in the promo materials, its wings were black! I didn't hear or see this directly, instead it was the main topic on our Slack chat with everyone being cautioned to Play It Cool. I didn't think much of it until I realized it was _my_ code that had caused this entire issue in the first place! Luckily we had a really good customer service guy that defused the entire situation, but that's the first and hopefully only time I've been tracked down in person by a customer for a bug.
- rezmason 2y ago
  Almost twenty years ago, a lady walked into my former employer, from right off the street, to ask that they unsubscribe her from the mailing list. She was in town on vacation and realized their offices were there, and just thought it'd be nice to get that dealt with in person. Especially because her attempts to unsubscribe electronically had repeatedly failed. Almost fifteen years ago, another of my former employers had an angry customer storm into their office and start shouting at the front desk associate. Soon after they relocated, and hired a full-time armed security guard to process all visitors straight from the elevator lobby. Any further, and you'd need to present photo ID and maybe sign an NDA before he'd buzz you in.
  - xxr 2y ago
    "Always code as if the guy^Wold lady who ends up maintaining^Wrunning your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live^Wwork."
odyssey7 2y ago
Just because it’s nice to visit doesn’t mean you should spend a year of your life there.
user_4028b09 2y ago
[dead]
weitendorf 2y ago
I did an internship at Epic and didn't fully appreciate it at the time, but I think their CEO Judy might be one of the best tech/general leaders ever. Epic has a reputation of hiring lots of new college grads. For software engineers that's not exactly uncommon, but Epic actually has a lot of employees working under titles like technical solutions/implementation solutions (or something like that): the people directly supporting the hospitals using Epic. Because these are pretty specialized roles, Epic has a very formal and fleshed out training program for their new hires with classes and courses and such, and it can take months to complete. They not only have their giant campus in Verona, they have an entire training center there, a huge auditorium for allhands, and a very streamlined recruitment process (for a ~21 year old it feels over the top luxurious). Although Epic does hire from more selective schools it seemed the majority of their new employees are from state schools in the Midwest. They also are private despite their size, just basically don't do M&A and are, relatively speaking compared to other big corporates/tech companies, in the middle of nowhere. In corporate America this is a highly unusual way to operate. I think it's underrated how big of a "risk" all these heterodox corporate strategies are for an executive and it speaks to amazing ideation and execution on Judy's part. Also, even though Epic does have a decent amount of turnover, she has taken a chance on tens if not hundreds of thousands of young people who didn't have the skills she needed them to have already, by giving them months of training and a really solid start to their careers.
- impendia 2y ago
  > it seemed the majority of their new employees are from state schools in the Midwest. I went to the University of Wisconsin for grad school, and I knew lots of people there who went to work for Epic. I confess that, before I applied, I imagined that Wisconsin was nothing but cow pastures and football. I imagine this sentiment is shared my many young job-seekers outside the Midwest. Now, having lived there for four years, I have to say that UW is an amazing university, and Madison is my favorite city in the US.
  - red-iron-pine 2y ago
    when I drove across the US for the military, relocating to near Seattle, I took a bunch of leave and stopped in Madison. ended up staying longer than I planned due to having a car parked in the wrong place and getting towed but really enjoyed the city. winters would be rough but the summers would be nice. culture seemed neat. kind of like a smaller, colder Austin.
w10-1 2y ago
The significance of this to me is by contrast to most of the valley companies (FAANG and their offshoots). Over the last 20+ years, people have been trying to build a mission-oriented company with a great culture, and confident enough to build their own tools. That was the default story. It turns out companies are transient or have been internally infiltrated by such (outsourcing- and ambition-driven) politics that any mission is more supplement than reality, and there's no sense of controlling your own destiny. So perhaps the dream persists out in the tech boonies in the ultra-sticky EHR domain, goosed by the Obama/insurance mandates to digitize, where developers are trapped by unportable skills. (Or perhaps in smaller B2B companies filling a niche.)
- robertclaus 2y ago
  I would say Judy is far too pragmatic to fall into the bucket of late 90's silicon valley startups. For example, people talk a lot about MUMPS being so quirky for the Epic operational database, but few people mention that Epic is a heavy Microsoft shop and ALSO provides a reporting SQL data warehouse built on SQLServer.
  - shigawire 2y ago
    If you said they were using a NoSQL database since the 70s, HN would think it was cool.
robertclaus 2y ago
I've long since moved into startups, but Epic was a great place to learn process and the less technical aspects of enterprise software development. The tech has modernized a lot in recent years, but still isn't transferable quite as easily as other tech companies - but that legacy means it's an amazing place to learn the why behind best practices.
kweingar 2y ago
Since this has become a general thread about Epic, here are my comments: I am amazed at some of the software Epic has built for itself over the years. Using its own database product (the backbone of the product they ship to customers), they built their own code review tools, design doc review tools, project management tools, time logging tools, etc. There is a unity and cohesion to the process of getting things done at Epic, better than my experiences at big tech. It is very easy to answer questions like "how many dev-hours were spent fixing bugs caused by the code written to implement project X?" or "will there be any days next week where every dev who has contributed to codebase Y will be out of office?" Imo they could really benefit from staffing infra/tooling teams better. Too many product devs, not enough devs tackling the low-hanging fruit that would make product devs way more productive.
dogmatism 2y ago
doc first, old linux hacker second Epic sucks. It only sucks marginally less than all the others. As a corp, they are expert at abusing mechanisms for lock-in as well as network effects If you all were forced to use tools as shitty as the EHR's, no one would be a software engineer A re-write of VistA would be the way to go, but someone paid off someone, and the VA is doing a disaster of a changeover to Oracle's Cerner tl;dr Healthcare software is a steaming pile of shit
United857 2y ago
I was excited to see the domain but it turns out this is Epic the healthcare software company not the game developer.
ksec 2y ago
The link is either down or blocked outside of US. For those not from US this has nothing to do with EPIC Games and I assume no part of Unreal is using MUMPS for those who are reading comments before they click on the link. This Epic has something to do with healthcare software. And kind of surprised how many people who used to work there appeared on HN.
- buildsjets 2y ago
  You are surprised because you don’t quite conceive of how large of a footprint they have grown in the US healthcare system. All the boomers and genxers who used to be on MySpace are now on MyChart.
  - BillSaysThis 2y ago
    100%!
- pandemic_region 2y ago
  Europe here, works for me.
- bob778 2y ago
  Epic is used extensively in the UK, Europe and Australia so to say it’s a regional thing seems odd? They’re speculated to be one of the largest privately held companies in the world.
- throwaway314155 2y ago
  For what it's worth, am an American and also thought this was about the gane company from the headline.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  i'm currently outside of the US and it loads fine
Kokouane 2y ago
Wisconsin local, currently attending UW-Madison for CS, and visited the Epic Campus when I was going to a local high school less than 30 minutes out. Talking to the engineers and exploring the campus is what solidified my choice in deciding to become a software engineer, so thank you Epic!
yawnxyz 2y ago
For those wondering, this is way more fun than the Epic Games office
jmcguckin 2y ago
What’s a typical Epic installation. Does it run on a single server? A cluster?
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  I worked on this team some years ago. It's a complicated beast, to put it mildly. Significantly more complicated than anything I've seen before or since. That also made it an excellent proving ground for me, to be fair. I've never doubted my sysadmin skills after that.
chiragmed 2y ago
How many tech companies have been consistently crushing it in their fields for nearly 50 years? I didn't appreciate Epic enough while I worked there (left 12 years ago), but I did learn some of their ways: - There were no PMs. No one was chasing vanity metrics. No endless barrage of a/b tests. No growth hacking. Instead, product was built the old-fashioned way - by talking to customers; quite often, customers would reach out to us! "Please build time-saving feature x", "support new medical procedure y", "help us publish more research by analyzing z". The heap of ideas was large, and teams were free to apply their own ranking functions. Some top-down strategic initiatives were threaded through all products. This led to every release being packed with things that customers wanted. - They leveraged their advantages. Plentiful, cheap land → everyone had an office with a door, possibly shared with 1 other person. Productive people flourished. On the flip side, those who were languishing fell faster and deeper into their holes. - They learned to live with their weaknesses. Not everyone wants to live in WI, and many who are willing to try end up looking for warmer pastures in a few years. Epic ended up being an early-career transit hub. Their attrition rates would cripple most tech cos, but they shored themselves through extensive training programs, and by rewarding the anchors that stayed. - They took pride in the product. Every month, the CEO personally presented the latest qualitative assessment of each product (as assessed by an independent third-party). If your product slipped from green to yellow, the pressure would trickle down to you. Also, there were no outbound sales, because having the product speak for itself was the sales strategy. Of course, not everything was rosy, but much has been said here about the shortcomings of Epic, and I wanted to point out what's contributed to the immense stamina that has kept them in the lead for decades.
- freeamz 2y ago
  >- Instead, product was built the old-fashioned way - by talking to customers; quite often, customers would reach out to us! "Please build time-saving feature x", "support new medical procedure y", "help us publish more research by analyzing z". Think that might be a plus. PM/PO has ruined the industry. This way at least one has a direction to the customers, which is something I can't say about large companies.
- intelVISA 2y ago
  No PMs is the real growth hack.
EugeneOZ 2y ago
> Emerald City > This extraordinary building is a playful tribute to the timeless movie Lyman Frank Baum would be surprised to read this :)
dagorenouf 2y ago
I read all these comments thinking it was about Epic Games. Then after 5 minutes clicked the link and discovered a one of a kind American company.
eddyg 2y ago
In case you're wondering what the Epic campus is like, this 18-minute minute tour by an Epic engineer will give you some idea. Well worth a watch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KURLmiszyl4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KURLmiszyl4

Visiting Us

139 points by tobr 2y ago

simonebrunozzi 2y ago

Side note: the real Verona seems to me much, much better and nicer than the one in the US, or the Epic campus.

Taikonerd 2y ago
C'mon, next you're going to tell me that Paris, France is nicer than Paris, Texas!

pavlov 2y ago

Epic used to be a heavy user of the legendary/infamous MUMPS programming language. I wonder how much that’s still being actively developed. This 2007 classic explains how a case of MUMPS progresses when you’re a programmer: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/a_case_of_the_mumps https://thedailywtf.com/articles/a_case_of_the_mumps

maxwelljoslyn 2y ago
Epic is still a heavy user of that language at the lower parts of its stack, but there are other, friendlier/more modern languages in pretty widespread use too. Depends on the team & sub-application.
epmatsw 2y ago
The state of MUMPS has progressed a lot since this article was written, to the point where most MUMPS developers would probably only vaguely recognize this. Even the "MUMPS" they were using back in 2014 or so was really a higher-level dialect + higher-level framework (Chronicles) that was transpiled down to actual MUMPS. It was more like writing ES2015 + JSX or whatever and then actually executing ES3 + DOM operations. Source: was on a team that was performance sensitive enough that I spent a lot of time in the actual transpiled MUMPS code that did look more like this article.
DaemonAlchemist 2y ago
Having worked at Epic on Mumps code, I am almost certain that article was about Epic.
- brokensegue 2y ago
  Does anyone else use mumps?

maxwelljoslyn 2y ago

Ayyyy, my day job is on HN. The campus is indeed cool, and I like working here (though I haven't been here nearly as long as some people!) If anyone's interested in Epic and wants one employee's opinion, my email's in my profile.

jbentley1 2y ago

I'm guessing somebody was listening to the latest episode of Acquired?

azhenley 2y ago
Objectively the best podcast. https://www.acquired.fm/ https://www.acquired.fm/
theturtle32 2y ago
From their episode description: "What if we told you that the person who started, runs and owns this establishment has legally ensured that it will never be sold, never go public and never acquire another company?" We DESPERATELY need more companies to structure themselves like this.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- crabmusket 2y ago
  It is really interesting to hear how this was a competitive advantage for them, and certainly a product advantage. The comparison between Epic (one database for everything) and Cerner (result of like 20+? acquisitions/mergers, patchwork of systems) around the Kaiser deal puts it in stark contrast.
  - odyssey7 2y ago
    Why is “acquisition” a bad word at Epic? Is it because the workers at a normal company would jump ship if Epic’s culture were imposed? If companies like Cerner, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. are all able to acquire and integrate software that was initially developed by others, why not Epic? Surely Epic is not less competent?
    - weitendorf 2y ago
      Epic has a pretty unique way of doing things in corporate america (maybe not that unusual for big tech companies, but very unusual for healthcare and general corporates) and I think acquisitions would cause them a lot more trouble than they'd be worth. For example, Epic has one giant HQ campus where they do actual-allhands in giant auditoriums and a really extensive training program with onsight classes and IIRC an entire massive building for it. Technically speaking I think they see buying software + changing it to be more like Epic (or continue to operate/develop/support it independently) as a waste of money when they could spend that time/money on improving what they already have. I also think it's probably a branding/marketing promise to their customers that if you buy Epic software, you're not going to have that contract morph into one with some other generic corporate company who causes problems trying to integrate/migrate your setup. Nor will you have wallstreet begging Epic to juice their customers for all their worth just because they might get away with it and it'd make the stock look good temporarily. (I have no idea how expensive Epic is comparatively but I do know EHR is very difficult to migrate from and Judy is known for playing the ultra-long-game). I think basically the idea is that acquiring another EHR vendor would only be for the benefit of expanding Epic (the company) market share but detract from making Epic's software a better product for their customers.

minimaxir 2y ago

I interviewed at Epic for my first job out of college a decade ago: while the campus is indeed beautiful, the sense I got was that they were trying to emulate Google's quirkyness while offering much lower salaries (but still relatively good given the CoL) and a less exciting product domain. I'm not sure how well that quirkyness appeals to prospective applicants in 2025.

tmiku 2y ago
My small liberal arts college sent a lot of people to Epic (3-5 grads out of each year's class of ~550), including me - they are known for hiring lots of fresh grads with academic-STEM backgrounds who lack tech industry experience into their technical services and QA roles. I think the hiring dynamics for those non-developer technical roles are more favorable to Epic than those for full developers, and those people tend to make up more of a company's headcount overall.
NoTeslaThrow 2y ago
Everything I've heard from word of mouth has been absolutely negative. Of course this has to be taken with a large rock of salt—who knows how reliable or representative this is—but five very negative reviews feels like it's on the unpopular side of the employer market in tech. I get the sense they're slightly less disliked than Meta or Amazon.

BeetleB 2y ago

Ah yes. The company that wanted to know my SAT and GRE scores, and then required me to do a personality profile quiz before rejecting me (did not even get to the entrance exam, which I was looking forward to). Still, I heard working there was quite good. Obviously not FAANG level salaries, but after you left and completed the 1 year non-compete, other health care companies and/or hospitals would pay a good premium for your MUMPS expertise. (None of the above is sarcasm, BTW)

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago

My first post-college job! Nothing but good things to say about it, all my colleagues were whip smart at what they did. I especially liked the interview process, where I had to do a couple of standardized tests online to prove I was in the top x% of test takers. Given that I had to lock down a full time job as fast as possible after college it was a real time saver to just be able to demonstrate objective general competence like that and move right on to the interesting stuff.

starfezzy 2y ago
> take an IQ test, skip the BS, work with highly intelligent people This is the way.

DoctorOW 2y ago

As a patient, I seek out MyChart because it's really well put together from my perspective. I've no idea how medical professionals and administrators feel about it, but personally I've had a great experience. I saw someone from Epic was here, so I just wanted to say keep up the good work :)

brickfaced 2y ago
I've been told by doctors and nurses that using Epic sucks, mainly because you're doing constant data entry while trying to listen to and care for patients, but that it's still far better than using any of Epic's competitors.
- justlikereddit 2y ago
  Everything is 'tech-person trying to "simplify" entry, into big buttons' Imagine the Idiocracy healthcare scene. But now you have a menu Diving system within a dense jungle of ten million options. I've never had to click through so many steps to get something very simple done. And I've never had so many completely useless features available The system is also built for the American healthcare system, but they also sell it to Europe with deceptive practices, with no simplifications whatsoever regarding the less overbearing legal landscape. As an end user: it's a shit experience to use no matter what you end up using it for, the price tag is an Astronomical Unit but the support you get for that is everything but stellar
  - olejorgenb 2y ago
    In Norway, the Epic system has been a big scandal with insane budget overruns and doctors/nurses protesting against the rollout
    - jukkan 1y ago
      Exactly the same story in Finland.
catgirlinspace 2y ago

brickfaced 2y ago

Epic is known locally as an exploitative, abusive employer of software engineers. Work-life balance is poor, pay is mediocre for the industry, and skills with their in-house tools don't transfer outside Epic. They have an extensive non-compete clause with EXTREMELY aggressive enforcement: https://isthmus.com/news/cover-story/opportunity-lost-epic-noncompete-list/ https://isthmus.com/news/cover-story/opportunity-lost-epic-n... They're also vehemently opposed to remote work, to the point that during COVID they tried to force employees back into the office in August, 2020 (!) in violation of a county public health order (!!!): https://www.wpr.org/economy/workers-officials-urge-remote-work-epic-seeks-bring-people-back-office https://www.wpr.org/economy/workers-officials-urge-remote-wo... Epic's Glassdoor reviews are terrible. Several personal friends each lasted less than a year at Epic out of college before finding new, better-paying employment elsewhere. Since Epic is privately owned and its founder and CEO has stated she'll never sell, its corporate culture will never change. It's better than no job at all but if you have other options, avoid.

deleted 2y ago
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mf_tomb 2y ago
This is just totally untrue, Epic is fine as a Dev. I have many friends who work there, none of them work more than 40 hours a week and they all make ~200k with 5 yoe. Great for Madison WI. Tech stack does suck, however.
- brickfaced 2y ago
  Glad your friends' experiences are exceptional. I know a woman working for Epic in the Madison area who miscarried due to work stress. Madison housing is also a lot less affordable these days, assuming you want to actually live in Madison and not a copy-paste Verona suburb w/ zero walkability: https://captimes.com/news/madison-home-prices-increased-the-most-in-the-nation-study-finds/article_5a46d632-4246-5907-8086-f9c9ced5b548.html https://captimes.com/news/madison-home-prices-increased-the-... And living in Madison means commuting to Epic in Verona, which means contending with Beltline traffic just as bad as 280 during rush hour.

neckardt 2y ago

My first job out of college was working at Epic on MyChart. Great people, terrible code. Epic’s main problem is a lack of clear internal code ownership. Everyone owns all the code. This means that even if you clean something up, someone on the other side of the company may come in and mess things up again. This led to really defensive programming where developers would never refactor, they would simply add a new if case for their new functionality somewhere deep in the code, then prop drill the data down. This led to every core function having over a dozen parameters and hundreds of branches. It eventually became impossible to reason about. Cross team calls were just function calls rather than defined apis. This made it fast to develop code initially, but terrible to own long term. This mainly applies to their Mumps code. While I was there I felt like Epic was beyond saving, but with a big push there may be something they can do: 1. Enforce some level of code complexity. Best practice is 40 lines per function and no more than 4 parameters per function. Epic probably shouldn’t shoot for that, but a 100 line limit and 6 parameters per function would already be a huge improvement. 2. Enforce strong code ownership. Epic has many people who are there for life, let them cook. Epic should segment off code to certain teams so those owners can fix it at their leisure. Cross team api calls should be clear API contracts. It would require some more discussions to get feature requests approved since not everyone can do anything anymore, but the code would gradually improve. Epic is too important to fail. I hope things have started to improve since I left.

aylmao 2y ago
What languages is their codebase developed in?
- jacinda 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
  - LorenDB 2y ago
    Since HN elided the URL to just the first M, I was hopeful (in a perverse sort of way) that the URL would point to Malbolge.

lvl155 2y ago

The fact that Epic remains the best available solution in healthcare is quite sad. That entire industry is rotten to the core.

zarathustreal 2y ago
It is indeed rotten, it’s a power struggle from the start. Power corrupts absolutely
zdragnar 2y ago
The difficulty isn't the product itself, but all the integrations. Every small clinic wants special custom formats. Insurance eligibility providers will lie about their abilities. Some insurance companies don't integrate with any eligibility check software. Sending health info anywhere requires yet more interchange formats. The actual note taking bit isn't too bad, and can be easily modeled with most flexible CMSs even. The problem is that you can either gamble on a startup offering everything that a company that has been in business since before you were born and actually being able to follow through, or you can just go with the established company like everyone else does. Having seen several startups trying to break into the space, it's no surprise that epic still dominates. The regulatory hurdles alone are not trivial; clinics that take Medicaid are usually required to use an EMR with a CEHRT certification which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to obtain.
undefuser 2y ago
Why is it sad, are their products not good?
- pacoWebConsult 2y ago
  It's a very complex system. Implementations cost hospital systems on the order of tens of millions of dollars. They have a near monopoly in the market. 2023 revenue was almost $5B [1] 1: https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/ https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

1oooqooq 2y ago

so, how much lower than California are the salaries in Wisconsin?

shigawire 2y ago
Less than you'd think in Madison, WI - but still crazy lower CoL than the bay for sure.

mikestew 2y ago

Must every company in the Midwest use a cow theme in some manner? Staff use cow bikes, cow carts, or cow vans to mooove across campus. It was cute when Gateway did it, still cute when FatCow does it (it is in their name), gettin’ a little cringe for the late-comers, though.

lapcat 2y ago
This is Wisconsin, the dairy capital of the world. We literally have cows at the state capitol: https://www.channel3000.com/video/cows-on-the-concourse-kicks-off-dairy-month/video_b989ecdd-89b9-5bab-9025-f643d42a61f8.html https://www.channel3000.com/video/cows-on-the-concourse-kick...
- travem 2y ago
  Surely the dairy capital is California? They out produce Wisconsin by a significant margin - https://wisconsinwatch.org/2023/02/does-wisconsin-produce-more-milk-than-any-other-state-2/ https://wisconsinwatch.org/2023/02/does-wisconsin-produce-mo...
  - lapcat 2y ago
    Well, Wisconsin is #1 in cheese production and was #1 in milk production until the 1990s, still #2. If you take milk and cheese together, I think the historical nickname "America's Dairyland" continues to be applicable, especially considering the importance of dairy to Wisconsin's economy compared to California.
    - doodlebugging 2y ago
      >and was #1 in milk production until the 1990s, OT for this interesting discussion about Epic but one of the reasons that Wisconsin slipped to #2 in milk production back in the 90's was that northern tier milk producing states instituted stronger environmental protections back in the 1980's forcing changes in how animal waste in huge dairy operations had to be managed. At the time there was a lot of pollution due to runoff of waste into creeks and rivers causing a cascade of problems with water quality downstream of these huge dairy operations. A large number of these operations, instead of complying with the new environmental rules that would force better waste containment simply looked around the country for areas that had less strict requirements, lower enforcement, and an established dairy industry. Many of them ended up moving to counties in north central Texas and buying up large tracts of cheap land. They shipped their herds south and went on about their business down here just as they had up there. Erath County became one of the state's largest milk producing counties as a result of this migration. Texas has been a cattle state for generations but most of the larger operations were traditional ranches of 10's of thousands of acres with lots of open land where cattle herds were measured based on # acres/cow metrics. Feedlots where cattle were fattened just before slaughter were the only places where you had large herds crammed into a small area. The dairy industry bought much smaller properties, up to several thousands of acres, and their dairy herds were crammed into these smaller spaces with the wastes being largely allowed to run off into creeks and rivers. It took years before Texas stepped in to try to get a handle on the agri-waste runoff pollution of their rivers and many large rivers in the state still have contamination issues. Not coincidentally, this same issue affected swine operations in the US causing concentration of pig farms in North Carolina due to lax regulations.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Is there some significance to this page other than the funky cow theme/elaborate travel guide?

viccis 2y ago
Doesn't seem so. All the comments are just litigating whether Epic is a good place to work. Not sure the point of it other than to try to get people to work there or not work there.
shigawire 2y ago
There was a recent episode of the Acquired podcast talking about the company. For it's relatively small size it plays an outsize role in the US healthcare sector. So in the same way ASML is an interesting business due to its niche role, this is similarly... Though with lower stakes
rgreasons 2y ago
They employ a lot of software developers and it’s a very unique campus. I considered it well worth the click.

amendegree 2y ago

I see jobs posted for epic all the time, I just have no interest in relocating to Madison and they are vehemently against remote work

throwaway96248 2y ago
They abuse LinkedIn, and probably other job sites, marking their jobs as remote or in different locations, even they all require relocation to Madison, to improve visibility. It's annoying and suspicious. I reported it to LinkedIn.
- shigawire 2y ago
  I'll defend them here and say there really is no good way on LinkedIn in to reach candidates across the country who might relocate... Unless LinkedIn changed recently. The posting are pretty up front about that requirement too, it's not like that is sprung on the candidate after they apply.
- odyssey7 2y ago
  If you notice a company lie while recruiting you, when should you expect them to start being truthful or fair? What other lies might await the candidate?

b0rbb 2y ago

I consulted with Epic once and got to visit the campus. Incredible place, super detailed, and I loved the cafeteria setup they had (great food too.) I definitely got a feeling that folks got burned out pretty quickly though.

ivraatiems 2y ago

Like many here, I worked at Epic just out of college and left after a few months. Everything others have said is true. I call the campus "Disneyland for sad people," because it's gorgeous, but also totally artificial, and nobody is happy. The one great thing Epic did for me was get me to Madison, WI, an amazing city of great people where I found a much better job and stayed for many years. I still miss it sometimes.

overgard 2y ago

Funny story about a visitor to a game development office. About 8 years ago I was working on a mobile game where you could purchase specialized dragons and eggs. Some of these could be pretty expensive, but since they were high end items we wrote special GPU shader code for them so they had cool special effects on them. We tested these as well as we could -- we had a room with maybe 100 or so mobile devices -- but of course we couldn't test on everything. One day an irate older lady came to our office, and our receptionist for some reason let her in (probably thinking old lady = harmless?). Keep in mind our office was unlisted because we didn't want fans dropping by. She had driven all the way up from Arizona to Colorado (although I don't think it was the only reason she drove up), and she accused us of ripping her off, because she had bought one of these fancy dragons and instead of getting what she saw in the promo materials, its wings were black! I didn't hear or see this directly, instead it was the main topic on our Slack chat with everyone being cautioned to Play It Cool. I didn't think much of it until I realized it was _my_ code that had caused this entire issue in the first place! Luckily we had a really good customer service guy that defused the entire situation, but that's the first and hopefully only time I've been tracked down in person by a customer for a bug.

rezmason 2y ago
Almost twenty years ago, a lady walked into my former employer, from right off the street, to ask that they unsubscribe her from the mailing list. She was in town on vacation and realized their offices were there, and just thought it'd be nice to get that dealt with in person. Especially because her attempts to unsubscribe electronically had repeatedly failed. Almost fifteen years ago, another of my former employers had an angry customer storm into their office and start shouting at the front desk associate. Soon after they relocated, and hired a full-time armed security guard to process all visitors straight from the elevator lobby. Any further, and you'd need to present photo ID and maybe sign an NDA before he'd buzz you in.
- xxr 2y ago
  "Always code as if the guy^Wold lady who ends up maintaining^Wrunning your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live^Wwork."

odyssey7 2y ago

Just because it’s nice to visit doesn’t mean you should spend a year of your life there.

user_4028b09 2y ago

[dead]

weitendorf 2y ago

I did an internship at Epic and didn't fully appreciate it at the time, but I think their CEO Judy might be one of the best tech/general leaders ever. Epic has a reputation of hiring lots of new college grads. For software engineers that's not exactly uncommon, but Epic actually has a lot of employees working under titles like technical solutions/implementation solutions (or something like that): the people directly supporting the hospitals using Epic. Because these are pretty specialized roles, Epic has a very formal and fleshed out training program for their new hires with classes and courses and such, and it can take months to complete. They not only have their giant campus in Verona, they have an entire training center there, a huge auditorium for allhands, and a very streamlined recruitment process (for a ~21 year old it feels over the top luxurious). Although Epic does hire from more selective schools it seemed the majority of their new employees are from state schools in the Midwest. They also are private despite their size, just basically don't do M&A and are, relatively speaking compared to other big corporates/tech companies, in the middle of nowhere. In corporate America this is a highly unusual way to operate. I think it's underrated how big of a "risk" all these heterodox corporate strategies are for an executive and it speaks to amazing ideation and execution on Judy's part. Also, even though Epic does have a decent amount of turnover, she has taken a chance on tens if not hundreds of thousands of young people who didn't have the skills she needed them to have already, by giving them months of training and a really solid start to their careers.

impendia 2y ago
> it seemed the majority of their new employees are from state schools in the Midwest. I went to the University of Wisconsin for grad school, and I knew lots of people there who went to work for Epic. I confess that, before I applied, I imagined that Wisconsin was nothing but cow pastures and football. I imagine this sentiment is shared my many young job-seekers outside the Midwest. Now, having lived there for four years, I have to say that UW is an amazing university, and Madison is my favorite city in the US.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  when I drove across the US for the military, relocating to near Seattle, I took a bunch of leave and stopped in Madison. ended up staying longer than I planned due to having a car parked in the wrong place and getting towed but really enjoyed the city. winters would be rough but the summers would be nice. culture seemed neat. kind of like a smaller, colder Austin.

w10-1 2y ago

The significance of this to me is by contrast to most of the valley companies (FAANG and their offshoots). Over the last 20+ years, people have been trying to build a mission-oriented company with a great culture, and confident enough to build their own tools. That was the default story. It turns out companies are transient or have been internally infiltrated by such (outsourcing- and ambition-driven) politics that any mission is more supplement than reality, and there's no sense of controlling your own destiny. So perhaps the dream persists out in the tech boonies in the ultra-sticky EHR domain, goosed by the Obama/insurance mandates to digitize, where developers are trapped by unportable skills. (Or perhaps in smaller B2B companies filling a niche.)

robertclaus 2y ago
I would say Judy is far too pragmatic to fall into the bucket of late 90's silicon valley startups. For example, people talk a lot about MUMPS being so quirky for the Epic operational database, but few people mention that Epic is a heavy Microsoft shop and ALSO provides a reporting SQL data warehouse built on SQLServer.
- shigawire 2y ago
  If you said they were using a NoSQL database since the 70s, HN would think it was cool.

robertclaus 2y ago

I've long since moved into startups, but Epic was a great place to learn process and the less technical aspects of enterprise software development. The tech has modernized a lot in recent years, but still isn't transferable quite as easily as other tech companies - but that legacy means it's an amazing place to learn the why behind best practices.

kweingar 2y ago

Since this has become a general thread about Epic, here are my comments: I am amazed at some of the software Epic has built for itself over the years. Using its own database product (the backbone of the product they ship to customers), they built their own code review tools, design doc review tools, project management tools, time logging tools, etc. There is a unity and cohesion to the process of getting things done at Epic, better than my experiences at big tech. It is very easy to answer questions like "how many dev-hours were spent fixing bugs caused by the code written to implement project X?" or "will there be any days next week where every dev who has contributed to codebase Y will be out of office?" Imo they could really benefit from staffing infra/tooling teams better. Too many product devs, not enough devs tackling the low-hanging fruit that would make product devs way more productive.

dogmatism 2y ago

doc first, old linux hacker second Epic sucks. It only sucks marginally less than all the others. As a corp, they are expert at abusing mechanisms for lock-in as well as network effects If you all were forced to use tools as shitty as the EHR's, no one would be a software engineer A re-write of VistA would be the way to go, but someone paid off someone, and the VA is doing a disaster of a changeover to Oracle's Cerner tl;dr Healthcare software is a steaming pile of shit

United857 2y ago

I was excited to see the domain but it turns out this is Epic the healthcare software company not the game developer.

ksec 2y ago

The link is either down or blocked outside of US. For those not from US this has nothing to do with EPIC Games and I assume no part of Unreal is using MUMPS for those who are reading comments before they click on the link. This Epic has something to do with healthcare software. And kind of surprised how many people who used to work there appeared on HN.

buildsjets 2y ago
You are surprised because you don’t quite conceive of how large of a footprint they have grown in the US healthcare system. All the boomers and genxers who used to be on MySpace are now on MyChart.
- BillSaysThis 2y ago
  100%!
pandemic_region 2y ago
Europe here, works for me.
bob778 2y ago
Epic is used extensively in the UK, Europe and Australia so to say it’s a regional thing seems odd? They’re speculated to be one of the largest privately held companies in the world.
throwaway314155 2y ago
For what it's worth, am an American and also thought this was about the gane company from the headline.
red-iron-pine 2y ago
i'm currently outside of the US and it loads fine

Kokouane 2y ago

Wisconsin local, currently attending UW-Madison for CS, and visited the Epic Campus when I was going to a local high school less than 30 minutes out. Talking to the engineers and exploring the campus is what solidified my choice in deciding to become a software engineer, so thank you Epic!

yawnxyz 2y ago

For those wondering, this is way more fun than the Epic Games office

jmcguckin 2y ago

What’s a typical Epic installation. Does it run on a single server? A cluster?

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
I worked on this team some years ago. It's a complicated beast, to put it mildly. Significantly more complicated than anything I've seen before or since. That also made it an excellent proving ground for me, to be fair. I've never doubted my sysadmin skills after that.

chiragmed 2y ago

How many tech companies have been consistently crushing it in their fields for nearly 50 years? I didn't appreciate Epic enough while I worked there (left 12 years ago), but I did learn some of their ways: - There were no PMs. No one was chasing vanity metrics. No endless barrage of a/b tests. No growth hacking. Instead, product was built the old-fashioned way - by talking to customers; quite often, customers would reach out to us! "Please build time-saving feature x", "support new medical procedure y", "help us publish more research by analyzing z". The heap of ideas was large, and teams were free to apply their own ranking functions. Some top-down strategic initiatives were threaded through all products. This led to every release being packed with things that customers wanted. - They leveraged their advantages. Plentiful, cheap land → everyone had an office with a door, possibly shared with 1 other person. Productive people flourished. On the flip side, those who were languishing fell faster and deeper into their holes. - They learned to live with their weaknesses. Not everyone wants to live in WI, and many who are willing to try end up looking for warmer pastures in a few years. Epic ended up being an early-career transit hub. Their attrition rates would cripple most tech cos, but they shored themselves through extensive training programs, and by rewarding the anchors that stayed. - They took pride in the product. Every month, the CEO personally presented the latest qualitative assessment of each product (as assessed by an independent third-party). If your product slipped from green to yellow, the pressure would trickle down to you. Also, there were no outbound sales, because having the product speak for itself was the sales strategy. Of course, not everything was rosy, but much has been said here about the shortcomings of Epic, and I wanted to point out what's contributed to the immense stamina that has kept them in the lead for decades.

freeamz 2y ago
>- Instead, product was built the old-fashioned way - by talking to customers; quite often, customers would reach out to us! "Please build time-saving feature x", "support new medical procedure y", "help us publish more research by analyzing z". Think that might be a plus. PM/PO has ruined the industry. This way at least one has a direction to the customers, which is something I can't say about large companies.
intelVISA 2y ago
No PMs is the real growth hack.

EugeneOZ 2y ago

> Emerald City > This extraordinary building is a playful tribute to the timeless movie Lyman Frank Baum would be surprised to read this :)

dagorenouf 2y ago

I read all these comments thinking it was about Epic Games. Then after 5 minutes clicked the link and discovered a one of a kind American company.

eddyg 2y ago

In case you're wondering what the Epic campus is like, this 18-minute minute tour by an Epic engineer will give you some idea. Well worth a watch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KURLmiszyl4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KURLmiszyl4