MITRE Lead Systems Software Engineer reviews

"The MITRE Way" has started to ruin a great company by making it like other companies. Many of the differentiating factors have diminished over the years: less emphasis on the "public interest", more emphasis on being a "business" and being "competitive", lower (but still good) retirement matching and vacation, more readiness to do "grunt work" instead of challenging research, greater emphasis on making "the customer" happy. Salaries are low, and nearly everybody I worked with was making below average for the company, let alone for industry. This has been compounded since 2009 by the implementation of Lump Sum Merit payments, otherwise called a bonus in industry. These were instituted originally as a one-time measure, but it seems that senior management got used to being cheap. An increased emphasis on commercialization of outputs and creation of products (though senior management swears up and down that this isn't the case) has led MITRE astray of what was once its core mission.