I recently had someone reach out to me and ask this question:
I see a lot of people that were at Unity, left, went to Epic, and a year later they are independent. Is Epic really such a terrible place to work at?
First off, you are always welcome to reach out to me with such questions, I am happy to share my thoughts.
Second, no, Epic is not a bad place to work, at all. I do believe that Epic is a very different company from Unity, and I can see how people that enjoyed Unity may not enjoy Epic. But in my case, that is not at all true. I don’t believe that Epic (or really any other big company) needs me to sing their praises, but given that other people might make decisions about where to apply based on what they observe, I will happily go on the record with some thoughts about Epic. I would hate if someone chose not to apply to Epic just because of what they infer from observing my behavior.
I have worked at Epic as an engine programmer close to Fortnite and UEFN, and my experience has been very positive. The level of technical skill at Epic is impressive. There is seemingly no-one there who is just “along for the ride.” My leadership chain set very clear direction and communicated a coherent vision, but gave me and others plenty of freedom in how to implement it. The technical problems were both challenging and interesting. My manager and direct coworkers were nothing short of amazing and some of my favorite people I have worked with so far. Someone described Epic as a “technical meritocracy”, and I felt that this is very true. This is reflected in Epic’s engineering management chain: even people multiple layers above me could be trusted to understand games in technical terms and quite often were once engineers there.
This also means that your experience there could be very different if you happen to not be an engineer, I have no insight into this. I also can’t judge how Epic works for folks who require strong guidance to work well: at least in my corner of Epic, you needed to take action yourself and run with it. Personally, I enjoyed all of this very much.
One particular thing I remember very fondly is Epic’s incident management: When you see something going wrong somewhere (Fortnite broken? Internal tooling down? Release is around the corner and you have found a show-stopper? etc.), you hit a button and start an incident. In a matter of minutes you have a slack channel, an incident manager, and multiple support folks rallied. They are always quick to figure out who needs to be brought in to help resolve the incident. In theory this means that you can get paged in the middle of the night, but in reality the on-call duty rotation has never been a problem for me (and for the one time I did sit down on a Sunday evening, there was ample follow-up to improve the process, and it worked).
Fortnite as a live-service game is constantly changing, constantly updating, and while at first I was not sure how much stress that would create, I did not find this to be a problem at all, even though my team’s work was very much in the “direct line of fire” and generally directly exposed to Fortnite changes at a large scale. Epic’s stellar incident management is probably a key ingredient here. I found quite the opposite, actually: There is just the right sense of “urgency” in all things to really make you focus on what matters and understand how your role contributes to the product’s success. Urgency forces you to ask and answer hard questions and align on values with everyone, because otherwise you will just be overwhelmed. I vastly prefer this over “we release once every 6 months and it takes us just as long to fix even small issues.”
So why did I leave? I think I did quite well at Epic, and it is nice when a place that is so obviously competent (but also quite different from my previous employer) reflects back to you that you are doing well and add a ton of value. On the other hand, I had always wanted to be more independent, just to figure out whether that would even work for me. I want to start more conversations with “yes, maybe we can collaborate for a while” and not “no, I already have a job.” I felt no need or urge to leave Epic. I left because Epic gave me renewed confidence, and I left knowing that I am probably going into less familiar, more uncomfortable territory. Getting the same signal of “you are doing great” in multiple, very different workplaces made me realize that I can probably take bigger risks, so that is what I did.