[HN Gopher] Visiting - Epic
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Visiting - Epic
Author : tobr
Score : 50 points
Date : 2025-04-21 20:49 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.epic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.epic.com)
| pavlov wrote:
| 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
| maxwelljoslyn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Having worked at Epic on Mumps code, I am almost certain that
| article was about Epic.
| maxwelljoslyn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm guessing somebody was listening to the latest episode of
| Acquired?
| azhenley wrote:
| Objectively the best podcast. https://www.acquired.fm/
| theturtle32 wrote:
| 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.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I'd rather see more co-ops and worker-owned companies than
| privately owned ones...
| crabmusket wrote:
| 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.
| minimaxir wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| BeetleB wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-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-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.
| mf_tomb wrote:
| 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.
| neckardt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What languages is their codebase developed in?
| jacinda wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
| LorenDB wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The fact that Epic remains the best available solution in
| healthcare is quite sad. That entire industry is rotten to the
| core.
| zarathustreal wrote:
| It is indeed rotten, it's a power struggle from the start.
| Power corrupts absolutely
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| so, how much lower than California are the salaries in Wisconsin?
| mikestew wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-kick...
| jacinda wrote:
| Exactly what "late-comers" do you mean here? Epic was founded
| in 1979.
| romanhn wrote:
| Right, Epic was founded years before either Gateway or
| FatCow.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Is there some significance to this page other than the funky cow
| theme/elaborate travel guide?
| viccis wrote:
| 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.
| amendegree wrote:
| 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
| b0rbb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Just because it's nice to visit a place doesn't mean you should
| spend a year of your life there.
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(page generated 2025-04-21 23:00 UTC)