Madeline Vogt
When Ethan moved from California a couple of years ago, he figured the Madison downtown bar scene would be a good place to meet people. About two to three months in, he started trying to find a serious relationship. He knew he would be working at Epic for a “minimum” of two years and thought it would be good to establish roots.
What he didn’t realize is that he’d have trouble finding people to date who aren’t his coworkers.
“If you’re in the dating scene, going out to bars here” — on the Capitol Square, State Street or even Willy Street — “you’re probably running into someone from Epic,” says Ethan, who like the other Epic employees interviewed for this piece, requested a pseudonym.
“Who wants to run into their boss while drinking?” he adds. “It definitely disillusioned me with the dating scene in Madison, because the main places to meet people are right here in downtown, right around the Square. And at most of the places I go to at this point, man, it’s pretty easy for me to identify what’s an Epic group and what’s not.”
He recently left Epic for another job.
“I don’t think I’ll ever experience a situation like this again,” he says, “where everyone in the dating pool has the same background or came for the same reason.” (The company is known for hiring young people right out of college and from other states.)
Young Madison residents who don’t work for Epic are also impacted by the Epic effect. Annika Allen, a 21-year-old UW-Madison psychology student, says she often comes upon a string of Epic employees when swiping through a dating app like Hinge or Tinder. They often don’t put their job in their profile, she adds, “but you can always kind of tell if they are like, 24 and they just moved from some random state.”
Allen says she has been on “between five and 10 dates” with Epic or ex-Epic employees. She can’t think of any local company with a similar concentration of employees on dating apps: “The dating pool is mostly Epic or UW.”
“The pool of dating is Epic,” agrees Jules, a recent UW-Madison graduate who’s being identified by a pseudonym.
Verona-based Epic Systems, the country’s leader in medical software, is a looming presence in Dane County, creating demand for new housing, retail and restaurants. It also appears to have an outsize impact in the romance arena. People Isthmus interviewed for this article say there is nothing necessarily bad about dating Epic employees, but it is unavoidable.
Says Jules: “Epic is definitely taking over the post-grad scene in Madison.”
‘That one IT company’
Seneca, 23, came to Madison as a student at the UW in August 2020. Like many of her peers at Epic, she started as a project manager shortly after graduating. In the time since, Seneca, who is lesbian, says women she’s matched with on Hinge and Tinder don’t have a negative reaction toward her employer, but are curious.
“I went on a couple dates with a [UW-Madison] senior who I knew before I started working at Epic this past fall,” says Seneca. “All of her questions about Epic were, it seemed to be, more out of curiosity and just like, ‘Oh, what is this mysterious company that has so many people?’”
Seneca says she sometimes encounters a stereotype that Epic employees may be a “little bit egotistical.”
“A lot of people who go to Epic are doing that to pave their way for med school,” says Seneca. “Or they worked in bioinformatics or [computer science]. I feel those majors and career paths already have that stereotype of being egotistical.”
Ethan, the ex-employee from California, says that in-person and online, he ran into assumptions that were less often based on negative perceptions of the personalities of Epic workers, and more so on whether they would be committed to a partner in the long-term. It got to the point where he removed any mention of the company from his dating profile, he says.
“It does come with assumptions, like, ‘How long are you gonna be here?’ ‘Are you traveling all the time?’ ‘Are you overworked?’ ‘Are you stressed out?’,” says Ethan. “Specifically for me as a developer, developers have this stigma of not being socially adept…there was definitely a point where I made the conscious decision to remove it from my profile, because…it felt stereotypical, but also it felt like it was creating assumptions that didn’t necessarily define me that well.”
Seneca and Allen both say that the stereotype around the abundance of Epic workers on dating apps largely applies to men. Part of that could be gender demographics of the company’s hires, though the gender divide among dating app users is likely also at play: 34% of men report having ever used a dating app, according to a 2023 Pew Research Poll, compared to 27% of women. Among the age 18-29 cohort, 53% of respondents said they have used an online dating app. The same poll notes that 9% more women, compared to men, said their experiences on dating apps were “somewhat or very negative.”
Epic employees are aware of their prevalence on dating apps, says Seneca, who notes that many employees will write “that one place” or “that one IT company” in their dating profile biographies, rather than “Epic Systems.”
Seneca views it as partially a self-jab, and potentially a way to ward off any negative connotations: “People who put ‘that one IT company,’ are trying to say that they’re not a part of or they don’t identify with that stereotype.”
Madeline Vogt
An illustration of a couple walking by the Sylvee.
Looking for community
Step on to Epic’s 1,100 acre, six-campus headquarters and you’ll see a company with a strong culture that pervades every quirky, fantasy or sci-fi inspired building: the company’s guiding “Ten Commandments,” like “Do not go public” and “Keep commitments” are plastered on all bathrooms in the campus. Mottos such as “dissent when you disagree” and “have fun with customers” are included in employees’ handbooks.
The company, founded in 1979 by CEO Judith Faulkner, is poised to hire thousands of employees this year, many of whom will be new college graduates. According to a 2008 Isthmus article, Faulkner justified the hiring practice to a Madison-based tech group by saying it is easier to mold bright young people, fresh out of college, into an “Epic person.” The company is privately held, meaning exact statistics are difficult to come by; an Epic spokesperson did not respond to a request for employee demographics, or for comment.
“They basically recruit almost exclusively out of college. People graduate and then they go to work for Epic,” says Allen. “Ex-Epic employees will say, in an almost self-deprecating way, ‘Oh, Epic is just an extension of college.’”
Catalina Toma, a UW-Madison communication science professor who researches online dating, says that it makes sense that the company’s employees would be prevalent on dating apps. People who are “younger, more educated, [of] higher socioeconomic status” and living in urban environments are more likely to use dating apps, she says. Those traits map well onto Epic employees, who are likely to enter the company with at least a bachelor’s degree and receive income far above Dane County’s $51,000 per capita average.
But she doesn’t think it’s indicative of a phenomenon unique to Epic.
“Epic hires a lot of young people, and they bring in a lot of new people to town,” Toma says. Plus, Epic hires people “from other places” who arrive without established social connections.
“Many of them come from far away. They don’t know anybody,” Toma says. “That’s when you would use technologies for dating.”
Allen agrees that many Epic workers “don’t have a ton of community.” She says she recently went on a date with an Epic employee who “didn’t seem like he was even looking for a relationship, necessarily.”
“I maybe got the sense that he was wanting to make friends,” says Allen. “People always say it, and it’s so true, that making friends as an adult is such a hard thing to do. So I think a lot of people do resort to dating apps because they are really yearning for community.”
That employee wouldn’t be alone. Younger Americans, particularly those who are unpartnered, are significantly more likely to report feeling lonely — 24% of people ages 18-29 report feeling “lonely or isolated from those around them all or most of the time,” according to a 2025 Pew Research Center poll. More men than women in that age cohort are single; 63% of men ages 18-29 reported being single in a 2022 Pew Research Center poll, compared to 34% of women.
Ethan says there is a loneliness problem among Epic employees, particularly those who move from far away.
“If you’re very introverted, if you don’t take advantage of [their orientation programming], or you get really serious about the job very early, it’s very easy to not really find people outside of your team to talk to,” he says. “The way Epic works, it’s very easy, if you’re not very cognizant about it, to let Epic take over your life — either from you finding someone romantically affiliated with it, or you not finding anyone and finding your purpose through Epic.”
Madeline Vogt
A quote from UW-Madison professor Catalina Toma.
‘Incentivized’ dating
When thousands of employees congregate in Epic’s subterranean Deep Space auditorium to hear from Faulkner at the company’s monthly staff meetings, there’s an opening act: slides of Epic employees who got married and photos of Epic employees’ newborns. Couples who met at Epic — and babies whose parents are both Epic employees — are identified with a heart icon.
Ethan sees these presentations as one way that Epic “incentivizes” or encourages employees to find a partner, perhaps at the company, and settle down in Madison.
Dating within the company, he says, “is pretty well integrated into culture there,” says Ethan, noting that there were married members of his team who met through Epic.If employees are offered a foreign post — the company has nine international offices — and their partner also works at Epic, the company will offer to move both employees to the country, he adds.
Epic maintains an internal social platform, called Guru, that contains employee profiles. Ethan says it’s frequent that Epic workers, after matching with another Epic employee, will look each other up on the platform to find out what interests they list on their profile.
“I know numerous people who have used Guru to get ahead on a first date, or essentially just get to know someone before even getting to know them,” says Ethan. “Usually people will put, like, what university they’re from, what their favorite sports teams are.”
Ethan thought about dating other Epic staffers but worried there would be no separation between his work and social life: “It felt like I was not escaping my day-to-day life,” says Ethan. “Unfortunately, everyone at Epic kind of just talks about Epic. I just could not deal with that.”
Seneca tried looking outside of the company, but says the glut of Epic workers has made it hard for her to find matches on dating apps: “It is a little difficult to find a woman on dating apps that is my age and isn’t a student still or doesn’t work with me.”
Ethan says Epic is “more lax about the rules about power dynamics and dating” than most other companies he has worked at. (An Epic spokesperson did not respond to a question asking if Epic has an employee dating policy.) He feels that’s a choice meant to reduce employee turnover: “They bring people from out of state and not with that much affiliation with Wisconsin. They are trying to give you a reason to stay. And romantic relationships are probably the best way to get someone to stay.”
(Isthmus reached out to several married couples who met at Epic; keeping with the company motto of “Do not go public,” all declined to be interviewed.)
Madeline Vogt
An illustration of a car from out of town with an Epic bumper sticker.
They keep coming
Jason Ilstrup, president of Downtown Madison Inc., says Epic is set to hire between 2,000 and 2,500 employees this year. Around 90% of those employees, he says, will be ages 22-26, and “60-65% of those folks are coming from non-Midwestern states.”
Employment at Epic, Ilstrup says, significantly contributes to Madison’s status as one of the top 10 cities Gen Z workers are moving to, and the city’s gradual shift from a “capital city and a university town” to an economically diverse, youth-forward community. The company has significantly influenced the city’s culture, he says, and businesses, housing developers and downtown event planners are acutely aware of the need to cater to a Gen Z audience.
Ilstrup argues that without Epic, the downtown concert venue The Sylvee might not have been built.
“That adds another amenity that people are looking for. They’re looking for experiences and things to do,” says Ilstrup.
No other private company in the Dane County area is growing quite at Epic’s pace. That has put strain on Dane County housing but brought steady business for hotels, restaurants and retail stores marketed toward younger audiences, Ilstrup says. It also means that the city has a reliably growing source of new young people — one other than UW-Madison students.
“Between those two sources, they’re two of the larger sources and the more stable sources for Gen Z new hires coming to Madison,” Ilstrup says.
And it means that Madison’s dating apps will likely soon see a new rush of Epic employees. Some will have gripes. But it could lead to some success stories, too — or at least some fresh faces in the city.
“Madison would be a much older city if it wasn’t for Epic,” says Allen, the UW psychology student. “Epic brings a lot of young, smart creative people into Madison, and I don’t think young, smart creative people would be pouring into Madison otherwise. In that sense, I really appreciate what Epic does for the dating culture and culture in general.”
