Yesterday I took a self-guided tour of the Epic Systems campus.

Interestingly, Epic Systems is a software development company, not to be confused with Epic Games. Epic Systems does not design games, they design software used by the medical industry. I would have expected something like this from a gaming company, not a medica data analytics and data management company.

Photos are allowed during the tour, but they are ‘for personal use only’, so I won’t post my photos here. If you take a look at the self-guided tour section of their website, you’ll find plenty of photos posted to the website, and they really don’t do it justice. It’s truly amazing what they’ve done with the decor of this massive corporate headquarters.

The experience generated a few questions and a few observations that (I think) are worth mulling over:

• How many janitors does it take to clean this place? It was MASSIVE, perfectly maintained, and free of bugs and pests. My companion on this visit could not get over that fact. It must require a small army of janitors alone, just to keep this place clean!
• When choosing to decorate a building in this manner, any use of ‘normal decoration’ is going to stand out by comparison. We walked through the ‘floating candles’ hallway that had wallpaper covered in candlesticks. In a building with normal ‘corporate decor’ this would stand out as unusual and the name would make sense. At this point in the tour, after everything else we’d witnessed, we were sincerely looking around for the floating candles and confused by the relatively drab wallpaper.
• The meeting rooms have amazingly useful names. I’ve worked in corporate America for a long time and meeting rooms often have a combination of letters and numbers combined with the building name and floor number – something like Meeting room AJ2 F2 Bldg 6 – which makes them difficult to schedule, differentiate, and locate. This place had meeting room names directly drawn from the overall theme, such as “dark arts” and “whispering wicket” in the Wizards Academy. They even had an enormous boardroom with framed photos on the wall, but instead of official portraits of the CEOs and founders, they had historic scientists, astronauts, Yoda, Gandalf, etc.
• The unique (extreme?) decor was amazingly USEFUL. Anyone who has made a visit to their employer’s corporate headquarters and tried to find their way around a collection of identical buildings with identical decor, inside and out, fully understands why the Backrooms video game begins in an endless series of offices with universally designed walls and office dividers. It’s really hard to find your way around when everything is so perfectly and uniformly designed. As we walked through the Epic Systems buildings, we used printed instructions that helped us navigate through the building. On the way back, we barely needed the instructions at all because the landmarks were so easy to remember and identify. You knew which building you were in, and which floor, based on the floor and wall design alone.
• My companion and I wondered if Epic Systems had a remote work policy in place. Our partial walking tour was over one (1) mile long, with a good number of stairs to climb/descend along the way. We could see construction sites in a few areas of the campus from the building windows (the campus is on an enormous plot of land with a working farm at the center of it – most of that land is open and empty). This left us wondering a) How many employees do they have? b) Are employees allowed to work from home at all? c) Why are they building MORE buildings? Are they expanding their workforce? The size alone was mind boggling, really.
• My companion pointed out how amazing it would be to work here. And then pointed out a) how distracting (they have a word search built into the stairs! Artwork and hidden object-style decor everywhere!), 2) how physically challenging it would be if you needed to get from one side of the campus to the other or your office was located a long way away from the parking garage (particularly in winter), and 3) how weirdly disappointing it would be if your office was located in the one area of the campus that you happened to like the least (e.g., an entire area dedicated to D&D and dragons and castles – and your office is placed in a section devoted to nursery rhymes).

As for the tour itself, it’s free, it’s amazing, and it’s a good way to get a long walk (a really LONG walk) scheduled into your day! I highly recommend checking it out.