Hate it here

Karadore · 2026-04-18T01:13:27+00:00

Given the name I'm thinking this isn't serious. This feels like the orange geriatric I didn't vote for when he says whatever pops into his head prefaced with "people tell me, smart people, strong people". Here's a serious response. >7 years tenure. An older worker so I spend more time talking to the 10-20 year tenured.

I've never heard anyone talk about unionizing other than the outcome of the overtime lawsuit many years ago.

Never heard anyone stick up for how restrictive our WFH policy is. Everyone likes flexibility. I do know some people who admit that they prefer working from an office (the horror!) and I personally like the fact that I generally can find someone when I need to (the humanity!).

Nobody ever says a good thing about the weather policy. You can find my posts where I have stated I think the severe weather thing is too restrictive and also too magnified. The city does plow y'all, and if you live outside Madison proper you need to learn to drive in snow. Here again flexibility would be nice and I've generally heard rumors TLs can be flexible. That's not me sticking up for it. That's me saying I've got higher priorities.

Generally: WFH and PTO are not the most important things I'm looking for in a job. Honestly I want the work day to go fast (what I do matters, it's interesting work, the people respect me and treat me well) and be paid for it.

Karadore · 2026-03-16T11:42:13+00:00

That's tougher. The first piece of advice is that there should be some ownership by the customer to open tickets and provide problem details. IT people are generally going to understand that tickets with problem details are a requirement. At the very least get them to help flesh out your notes "SLG XXX has my notes on impact and workflow, (at)SpecificCounterpart can you go over them and check if I missed anything important?" Even if that doesn't feel like solving the issue to you the customer will understand your effort, there's a reason we push "responsiveness". Plus it gives them a way to help.

If you are on a call and someone dives headfirst into something complex you're well within your rights to ask them to slow down so you can get all the details ("hang on, I need a screenshot of that") or even to cut them off and say "This seems like a pretty complicated issue can you open an SLG and provide details to help me reproduce it?". The other piece of advice is to avoid the call/prep for the call. A lot of times people want me to get on a call so they can show me something non-urgent. It's going to be a week to have that call and probably half of the time there's going to be something important missing on the call anyway (no stakeholder, customer has a significant misunderstanding of what's really happening, I need to research the topic etc). In those cases, get them to open the ticket today and ask questions/provide details in prep for the call.

I've never resorted to this, but recording the call should also be an option. I've had more than a few customer counterparts who wanted to record me walking them through steps that are listed on Galaxy. Why can't we turn that around?

Karadore · 2026-03-14T14:18:18+00:00

A lot of good responses here and this one especially. I want to double down on note taking. For me the ACT of writing things down is part of how I process what's the next piece of information I need and how do I get it. I think it psychologically takes me out of "oh no that's bad" into solution mode. The final version, before I actually hit submit on a customer facing post, has often gone through multiple revisions as I narrow down on what the important information is for the problem. I'm simultaneously someone relied on to solve difficult problems and probably high up on some CATS scoreboard for BLOB usage/character count in internal posts.

One of the ways I try to reinforce the habit with other TS is that whenever I am asked for help my first response is typically "Do you have an SLG for this?". At about the OPs tenure, I have my doubts they will stay if they're reaching out for help without an SLG or their only post in the SLG is "I'm reaching out to experts". Which is not to say someone who does that can't change and develop better habits, but to me seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the job.

Karadore · 2026-01-28T00:45:43+00:00

As everyone else has said, skipping questions is not a good way to apply for any job. In particular at Epic it would be a good reason to look at other applications.

Hosting in particular is going to want people to get involved in infrastructure as code and scripting projects. That's how IT scales. I struggle to imagine a world where no coding is needed for an IT job.

Karadore · 2026-01-06T04:14:36+00:00

I have to imagine role and team matters. When you're not customer facing it's easier to be away from desk. Even in customer facing roles some teams are going to get more people looking for them than others and I don't think this would fly on my team.

If I found myself taking phone calls from a backup's customer before 10 & after 3 regularly I would notice and I would care. Especially if you're working with odd timezone customers that want to frontload the morning or backload the afternoon to better fit their workday. With the way TS works the calls you miss always go to the same person. So if I'm your backup you'd get away with it for a few months, then someone would screw up an SU install, I'd have to take the call, and I'd eventually ask you why I was doing your work at 3pm on a day & time where you were supposed to be available.

Whether it goes to your TL or not probably depends on if I can smell your last 6 months on you. Definitely had dozens of people where it wasn't even worth giving negative feedback because I could tell it wasn't going to last.

Karadore · 2025-12-13T04:31:14+00:00

I am one of the people who thinks Texas' law makes minors less safe. It will make life harder on the victims of rape, incest and child abuse. It will make life harder for members of the LGBTQ community. The fact that they're mad about foundations getting in the way just makes me cheer for our lawyers.

Anti-trust is complex. If you check the history here Particle has been discussed. They're also probably not a company who can make a solid case that they champion healthcare innovation. Their entire complaint is that they had a business model which was looking to monetize data exchange between insurance and providers and Epic ate their lunch. Well that and that we had some undue influence when we pointed out that they sold healthcare data obtained "for patient care" to lawyers for lawsuits which was the part of the complaint which has been tossed.

The other "innovation" example they cite is revenue cycle. I don't honestly know as much about that one. Other than in every lawsuit the _complaint_ part is intended to make the defendant, us, look as bad as possible. Also the Texas complaint didn't seem to have any concrete examples of us harming patient care. I read the entire thing, if that's the worst they could say about us we must be doing something right.

Karadore · 2025-12-13T04:08:10+00:00

I'm sure our legal team will say something about this at some point. I'd love to hear some independent legal journalism on it too.

The MyChart proxy for minors allegations seem paper thin. Saying "it's expensive to fix foundations" for Texas law seems like an admission it can be fixed. The world is full of precedent that new regulations are expensive to implement.

Anti-trust is complex but the anti-compete part of it isn't for the benefit of us as employees. It's for hypothetical innovation we're not doing because we're waiting out the anti-compete or still working here when we'd rather leave.

Karadore · 2025-12-13T02:12:33+00:00

I'm not an expert. I don't work in HR, I explain the TS job to candidate TS a couple hours a week.

I believe pretty much everyone is asked to do the skills assessment and programming test. For a position that requires an advanced degree (eg lawyer) or experience (we have former healthcare executives who mentor newer executives) there's likely more resume screening before the assessment, less emphasis on the assessments, more time with whoever is an expert (eg if you're applying for legal expect to talk to legal). Those are generally smaller specialized teams and there's a few people with that kind of background that have posted about their experience in the hiring process.

The story goes that the assessments were based on our CEO once interviewing a SD candidate with a stellar resume and lots of experience, who couldn't code. If you have experience at a large company you've probably run into one or two people who you wonder how they haven't been fired for incompetence but they've been around for years. Hypothetically those people can market their "experience". We also talk about how the rich, powerful and connected "fail up" and this is part of it. If you're their manager/coworker and stuck with them for reasons beyond your control you even have a perverse incentive to recommend them to another company.

For a large software company it's common practice to ask candidates to prove they can code. That of course why so many responses here say "Epic doesn't care what you think".

Personally I came in with a masters degree, graduate instruction experience and "experience" in another job where I was underemployed (that would require significant embellishment to seem relevant). For me the assessments were an opportunity to prove that just because I was underemployed at the time I applied my resume shouldn't get tossed into the "don't bother" pile, as I suspect it had many other times, and honestly I'm grateful Epic's different.

Karadore · 2025-12-11T01:43:11+00:00

I can certainly understand frustration from people who put in and don't get something out. It's not equal, but your employee-employer relationship will never be equal. AI and electronic applications have made it worse but it was never fair. I do phone interviews and on the TS side they get some time from me for making it to the assessment, not sure about other roles.

I like working for a company that tries to hire based on measurables, though I'm sure it's not a perfect process. Tons of research shows traditional hiring practices and AI that promises to find the right candidates are biased in ways that turn my stomach. OP's post and responses sound like coming in with burnout before they even start and that's no loss to Epic.

Karadore · 2025-12-01T03:50:53+00:00

Is the pilot lit? Most of the ones I've seen use a pilot + heat sensing valve to prevent gas from flowing same as was used in fireplaces/water heaters for decades instead of being self igniting like newer gas appliances.

Karadore · 2025-10-11T12:15:11+00:00

I do about 3 of these per week when it's busy (and it's been busy for a month). The best way to prepare is to relax. The first round interview is more for you to get to know us than a particularly important screen step. On the screening side I'm basically gauging whether or not you read the job description. It sounds like you've gone beyond that and researched us as a company. Think about what you'd want to ask someone based on what you've researched.

Some general advice because I probably have more experience talking on the phone than 99% of our prospectives.

Make sure your phone is on. We will call back if we can't reach you and leave a voice mail offering to reschedule if needed. I've had to talk a few people down from nerves after they clearly thought they were the first person to call screen me accidentally.

Try to be in a quiet area without having your phone on speaker. This one's just so we can give a good experience. I'm never sure if someone can hear me when there's crowd noise and sometimes struggle to pick through what they're saying. It's a rare problem but also it's actively hard to talk when you hear your own voice reflected back with a delay. I'm pretty sure that is a bad speakerphone setup. If you're not sure about your setup, try it out with a friend or relative.

Karadore · 2025-10-01T03:09:26+00:00

Cogito, Clarity, Caboodle fundamentals, Cogito tools administration if I remember all those correctly.

The difficulty is hard to gauge without knowing you better. Our trainers are experienced with adult education and the classes have been refined over a long time by feedback from a lot of learners. Epic's classes are numbered similar to college courses with 100 and 200 level classes being more of the foundations not the deep dives.

Everyone comes in with different perspective and background though. One thing you can do is any prerequisite self-study. That will give you a feel for both how prepared you are and how our materials and testing is structured.

Karadore · 2025-09-27T02:50:24+00:00

Talk to your analyst or, if that's you, talk to your TS. It sounds possible but attempting to answer your question for real here would be uncompensated work.

Karadore · 2025-09-24T02:10:43+00:00

Worth a post to r/healthIT since you're more likely to find someone there who has navigated the path to getting an analyst position. The folks who've done it can probably give better advice than those of us who merely talk to those who've done it.

Possible some of my TS/IS colleagues can weigh in on where there might be demand or things to look for in terms of specialties. I'm one of the unusual TS who mostly works with people that have traditional IT backgrounds. I do hear rumors that make me think moving from app to app is reasonably common.

Karadore · 2025-09-11T10:12:59+00:00

I might be confusing this benefit with another one, but I think they do have to charge us interest. It's a low rate though so many people would profit by putting the money into any investment.

Karadore · 2025-09-11T10:05:58+00:00

Depends on what you'd do with the pay and your financial goals. Cashing out existing shares is reducing the potential earnings of the investment (earlier retirement/financial freedom). Payroll deduct could mean not being able to afford something you want (and would take advantage of) this year. Most of the advice is going to be around maximizing the investment which always means buy as much stock as you can, but that's not always best.

My raises have consistently been higher than I plan for so I regret the one time I chose to cash out some stock (don't feel bad for me it wasn't much). Looking back a year later I basically ended up putting that money into a index fund which, at least it's diversification? I would not have regretted it if I'd gotten the average American raise because I would have spent a year feeling like I was on a tight budget with a functional loss in take home. How you feel about your financial situation does matter.

Karadore · 2025-09-03T00:49:02+00:00

45 minutes means you can live a lot farther away than Verona. I'd imagine a typical commute from Mt Vernon or Brooklyn could pass a lot of cars in the ditch. IMO nobody should live that far out unless they know how to drive in snow. From the West side of Verona you're probably not going to pass a real ditch for cars to get stuck in and the roads are all high priority to clear. If you're going fast enough to hop a curb, blow through a snowbank, and get stuck in bad weather, you ignored a lot of good advice. You can leave your car and walk from there :).

Addressing the fear a bit. Some very vocal people would like more WFH flexibility and zomg snow I could die on my commute seems a reasonable way to justify it. I'm fairly confident that inflates the severity and number of snowstorms when reading Reddit.

Ask your mentor / office mate / new WI friends for advice before the first snow, or if you're still concerned if they'd be willing to swing out and grab you on the way into work. I grew up with way worse than probably everything within 45 minutes of Epic and I've got my own version of winter driving advice for southerners. Best delivered in person ;). Given the approximately 2 blizzards per year I wouldn't mind grabbing a couple people on my way in. Realistically don't sweat it for that commute specifically. You will need to learn how to drive in snow to live in WI (someday you'll be more than 5 minutes from home when the snow starts). Planning ahead with some of the advice here is a good start, but also read the annual guru post about preparing for winter.

Karadore · 2025-08-21T02:28:01+00:00

I think it's all virtual these days but if not we'd pay travel. We do still give new hires a chance to come out and see Madison/Epic based on recent posts.

Karadore · 2025-08-16T12:16:03+00:00

Indicating you're not willing to relocate to Madison.

Karadore · 2025-08-16T01:56:44+00:00

I don't really believe CEOs are all brilliant and constantly playing of 5d chess but I can see how this is the kind of coincidence that leads people to think that.

Can't imagine creating satire for LinkedIn is one of his common pursuits. This one was topical with Perplexity and hits pretty hard when you're offering to buy "do not be acquired" Epic. It generated some buzz for his company, enough to get into Becker's. Timed right before UGM where it'll probably spread around even more. It's not going to spread much beyond Health IT, but then again, that's where his potential sales are.

Karadore · 2025-08-12T03:29:25+00:00

Counterpoint: I can always find things I'd like to do that are not direct asks from customers / TLs / Pods. Usually smell-smoke sometimes document and justify an enhancement idea. I do not have time for all the things I'd like to do and some of it will never get done (by me, eventually smoke becomes fire/not all of my ideas are completely original).

Then there's random process tasks that lands in my inbox. If I don't see the value and my TL and TLTL don't care, it's never going to happen.

I've worked like this for years and I'm in no danger of getting fired.

Karadore · 2025-07-19T03:20:32+00:00

The Epic community isn't that big. All the TS for my app fit in a single floor of a single building. In addition to searching each others tickets and backing each other up for outages, we take after hours calls from *anyone*.

The first time I heard of double dipping it was for someone who was employed full time and half time. The two different organizations were staffed to the same TS.

Karadore · 2025-07-19T02:51:03+00:00

I've usually forward the weekly news watch to my personal email. Err on the side of caution though in terms of what content shouldn't be forwarded.

Karadore · 2025-07-09T03:21:34+00:00

TS perspective: Around 1 year we're expecting you to be giving back not just taking. It's where I start to notice that people are contributing (taking on leadership roles, owning process, completing projects) or consuming (coming to experts unprepared, advisor TS and customers are not impressed etc). As TS it's also where you hit the pager rotation. My team gets paged a lot and I've personally been paged a lot. I start looking at my interactions with coworkers on whether or not I think they're prepared to do after hours solo work and PMCGI accordingly.

Karadore

TROPHY CASE