There were no archaic superstitions about code structure. Those had to be removed, because the code had long ago grown large enough to push up against size limitations. You couldn't put comments in the code. You had to use the abbreviated syntax. If you tried to make anything human-readable, it wouldn't fit.
You weren't even allowed to touch the infrastructural M code. Mostly, you worked on superficial or peripheral M code, or on the GUI in VB6. I heard rumors of a GUI modernization team, but never saw any direct evidence of it.
It was a result of the iron grip of the top management. They didn't want to yield control of the company to the people actually running it. You were expected to use your expertise to do what you were told to do, in the best way you could, while still remaining completely within your lane.
After the 6 months of training, I gave it a year to read the character of the company, and then another 6 months to soak some potentially major family health care costs with that sweet insurance plan, then spent 4 months job hunting. It was the best employer-offered health insurance plan I ever had.
But make no mistake. Companies like Epic are why health care costs in the US are huge and growing. Epic never refactors anything that still works well enough to hold together with some expensive human labor. It is a technology company that runs on well-trained people instead of well-designed code and processes.
The size limits were for object code, not source code. Comments and short command names have no impact on object code size. Ages ago, there was a 32KB object size limit. Now you can use up to about 8MB, which is large enough for pretty much all non-machine generated code. You can, of course, just use multiple routines to avoid the limit.
When did you work there?? I find it surprising you never saw anyone writing C# or TypeScript if it was any time recent. These days there's quite a bit of web-based UI replacing the VB6, though you might not notice if you don't look carefully enough.
If it was any more than a year ago, there were parts of the company that had barely started and web migration due to dependencies. Epic is still slow playing this to make sure they don't have some of the issues they had with the early 2015 releases
You weren't even allowed to touch the infrastructural M code. Mostly, you worked on superficial or peripheral M code, or on the GUI in VB6. I heard rumors of a GUI modernization team, but never saw any direct evidence of it.
It was a result of the iron grip of the top management. They didn't want to yield control of the company to the people actually running it. You were expected to use your expertise to do what you were told to do, in the best way you could, while still remaining completely within your lane.
After the 6 months of training, I gave it a year to read the character of the company, and then another 6 months to soak some potentially major family health care costs with that sweet insurance plan, then spent 4 months job hunting. It was the best employer-offered health insurance plan I ever had.
But make no mistake. Companies like Epic are why health care costs in the US are huge and growing. Epic never refactors anything that still works well enough to hold together with some expensive human labor. It is a technology company that runs on well-trained people instead of well-designed code and processes.