My interview at Epic Systems

Recently, I’ve been looking a good job in my field, something that helps people, and contributes to society.

One of the places that i looked into working for was Epic. The specific position I applied for was “Problem Solver”, and the job entailed some light programing, as well as trouble shooting clients. not a help desk position, but I was promised that each problem would be new and exciting. As the Interview process wore on, I queried the internet to try and figure out what to expect. i found nothing.

After the initial application, a follow-up phone interview was arranged. they were very thoughtful about this; not only did they ask what a good time would be to talk to me, they also asked for the timezone. “pretty slick” I thought. I did a person search on my interviewer on Myspace and Facebook, and found that he did have a Facebook account, but was on a different network, so i really couldn’t see too much. I did notice that he graduated from Harvard in ‘03. lots of people were on the Epic network, which was kinda cool.

The phone interview went kind of shaky, with lots of quite pauses. I didn’t really feel that i did well in the question answering either, but somehow, Epic wanted to move on to the next step of taking me to Corporate HQ in Verona WI.

They provided travel arrangements, hotel accommodations (at the Hilton, which was really pricey), food, and taxis. everything was taken care of for me. it was pretty considerate.

The Interview started at 8 am, when i needed to leave for the interview from the hotel. There were a few other candidates that stayed in the same hotel as i did, and i found out later that a few other candidates stayed at other hotels. everyone was interviewing for different positions, so it wasn’t too bad. However, no one knew at the time, and the 30 min cab ride was pretty tense.

The cab driver was an older gentleman, than looked a little out of place in a straw hat, overalls, and a gazillion commemorative pins in that hat. he was overweight, and had a white beard.

When we got to HQ, we were all pretty amazed at the size of the place. it was about the size of a community college in terms of number of buildings, but had 400 acres of land. they were building more office space even.

The interview kicked off with a brief overview of the day, then a tour of the building, and then a demo of the product. On the tour of the buildings, we were shown how beautiful it was. the courtyard had well trimmed trees shrubs, and a small water feature running though it. the insides of the buildings were decked out in art, and each building had a theme (Scandinavian, Jungle, Eclectic, etc). The demo was okay, the guy seemed like he did it a lot, and was kind of slick about all of it. for some reason I saw a lot of an older, overweight gentleman with a white beard during the demo, that looked a lot like the cab driver. I chalked it up to coincidence, because the guy in the demo was a CEO.

after that, we broke up into groups to talk to people in the are that we were interviewing for. Two other people and myself talked to a Technical Services guy for about half an hour about the job. a few of the points he stressed were that “everyone gets offices. everyone!” and “after 5 years you can be a guru in your field”. I thought both of those were pretty silly things to talk about, but i guess they were pretty important to him. he also told us it would be good to ask lots of questions later in the day. I nearly responded with a quick “why?” but thought better of it. in hindsight, i really should have.

After this was Lunch. Lunch was served in a big room, with large windows over looking a deck, that over looked the 400 acres of land, that over looked the rest of Wisconsin. Wisconsin is pretty flat, so you could see quite a bit of it. the food was pretty cheap, my meal of a veggie sandwich, salad, and coke came to about $ 4.50 . Epic picked up this too. I had company at lunch in the form of another interviewer. I guess this one was just to feel out what kind of personality i had, so we just talked about stuff for a bit. Absolutely no agenda here.

Then the real interviews started. First was a person from the Tech services dept, and she had an “overview, then an interview”. the overview was a more detailed description of what the tech services guy said before, and she had some power point slides on her computer that she showed me. Then the interview. The interview was pretty crappy. I wasn’t prepared to answer questions like “Describe a situation to me where you thought you did something right the first time, went back to it, and later found out that you did it incorrectly”. lots of those. lots of “tell me about a time when…” and they usually were pretty specific. I tried to be perfectly honest about the whole thing, telling them that I didn’t know when i didn’t know, but many of the questions she asked went un answered, or i felt the need to go off on a tangent to get in some talking time. nothing i said was evaluated by them, they simply wrote down the points i made, and asked the next one. very crummy.

After this was the interview by HR. and this was the worst ever. nothing to do with my field. no real point to these questions either, just the standard bullshit HR questions. “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” “what would so-and-so say were your greatest strengths and weaknesses” . you know, all the really shitty HR questions. I wasn’t prepared for this, so i think i blew this part too. the worst was when salary negations came up – “what do you expect to make?” i shoot off a number, and ask her what they were thinking of paying me, and the she goes “well, we really don’t negotiate salaries; we pay what we think in competitive for your level”.

Finally, after this, was the Test portion of the interview. there were 3 tests i was asked to take, and was asked to record my time as well for each portion. there was also a 2 minute test, that tested how quickly i could think. i was all alone in an office, with 3 clocks on the wall. they allowed me to wander around if i needed to, and use the bathroom too. They were assholes when they interviewed, but they were pretty attentive to my needs. I also had to sign something saying that i wouldn’t publish the test questions, or answers. The 3 tests i took were on programing, something about thinking again (math [algebra mostly], logic, and another easy subject), and then something else on programing.

The first test on programing was how to use a language that they made up; it focused on comprehension and boolean logic, and lots of evaluate the statement : A = true, B=true, is ‘A OR B’ true, false,undetermined, or none of the above (multiple choice stuff). It was a lot like my C++ class, but used arrays. I think i did okay on that one.

The other programing test was to write code for some simple programing problems. you had your choice of C++, pseudo code, and a few other languages. they also asked me if i wanted to use a language that wasn’t listed. This was not multiple choice. you just had to write down the answers in the blue notebook you were given. I think i should have gotten somewhere around 75%.

I turned in the tests, and was done. a taxi took me to the airport, and i got on a plane, and left.

They called me back in a week about the job. pretty nice of them.

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Tags: Epicsystems, interview at epic