It feels like there is virtually no career growth potential. Here are the titles for engineers and the years of experience required to have that title:
Member of technical staff (MTS) -- 0 years
MTS2 -- 2 years
Senior MTS -- 5-15
Principle MTS -- 40
There are roughly 400 SMTSes and more every year. 10-15 people are made PMTS every year, but that includes people hired from outside the company, so maybe 5-8 per year are promoted from SMTS. Assuming the best, that 8 are promoted per year, that means on average it will take 25 years to be promoted. You basically need to be internationally known in your field to be promoted, as well as off the chart in every way imaginable, most of them having more to do with project management, business development and customer engagement than engineering, but most of all it is politics. You have to have the right powerful friends championing you or you don't stand a chance. It's great that they want PMTS to be prestigious, but just know that your career will almost certainly peak in your 30s and you won't be promoted again before you retire.
Note: the rules may be different for MIT grads, which may explain why so many of them make a point of wearing their college rings as middle-aged engineers.
Raises have been 1.5%-2.75%. Salaries are competitive with non-Cambridge and non-Boston-based companies, like MITRE and Lincoln Labs, but not with anything in the area. The hiring process is so slow that often by the time we give an offer the candidate has been relocated by another company and has been working for weeks or months. There are no fringe benefits like free coffee because it's a non-profit.
All offices are being torn out and replaced with... I don't even know what to call it. It's like a cube farm, but worse. No cube walls, nothing to block sound, people talking all around you, taking phone calls, walking behind you while you try to concentrate. Basically Google did it, ergo it's the best thing ever so we must do it, despite the scientific consensus that it lowers productivity. When asked about employees who wouldn't be able to work in that environment, Ken Gabriel reportedly said that those are the people he wants to quit anyway. Draper had a low attrition rate (10% I think) but he indicated he is aiming for the industry norm of 25%, or 4 years (the 401k is fully vested in 5 years.)
