Mainly for retirees and "late career" folks
Pros
- The work life balance is pretty nice. Many employees can work whatever hours they want, whenever they want as long as the work gets done and they work 80 hours every pay period (2 weeks) - Education benefits in exchange for service commitments - A good retirement plan - Many available projects to work on across many different organiations
Cons
- A very obvious age difference. Younger employees like myself in their 20s to 30s will find themselves surrounded by employees in their 50s to 60s. This is especially true at the McLean offices, though I hear its a bit better in Bedford. There is a pretty significant revolving door of young, technical people leaving, while older people will stay until retirement. - A good portion of hires are retirement aged former government employees. If this is your demographic, MITRE is probably a great place for you. - Very top-heavy organization, due to the two points above, - Management claims that technical talent is extremely valuable to them, yet they do a poor job of obtaining and maintaining them. Management claims that MITRE has a "technical path", where technical employees can still advance and obtain raises without being forced into an unwanted management position. However, any advancement or raises above a certain point are practically impossible without taking on a hard leadership role at some point, - While there are a lot of different projects to work on for different people, almost all of MITRE's work deliverables are PowerPoints, spreadsheets, and Word documents. It is very difficult to find actual hands-on work to do here and when you do that work is almost always under appreciated, under valued and inconsistently available. - The culture in MITRE is very similar as its majority demographic: old and resistant to change. MITRE rarely produces anything new and sticks extremely hard to documents and standards produced years ago. - No bonus structure, profit sharing or additional compensation available.
