MITRE reviews

MITRE used to have a great reputation as an employer, and for a while management was concerned that the company had dropped off those lists; now managers talk about why those lists “don’t matter.” Recent (2012) cutbacks in benefits (less personal time earned per pay period, lower personal time balance carryover allowed from year to year, full vesting in 401K but 1 year working for the company before they match your contribution, 8 holidays a year). Individual managers seem to be given a good deal of autonomy and control – the effect is a lot of fiefdoms where, if you have a good manager, you’ll do well, but poor managers are given very little guidance or feedback. Very little training or guidance offered to managers and no institutionalized feedback loop from team members as to how well the managers are doing. The former head of HR recently left the company, with no explanation from upper management – what’s going on?? MITRE tells employees they pay a premium above average salaries in the area, but they don’t, and raises and promotions are meager and slow, at best. The company prides itself on offering “work-life balance” but balance and initiatives are offered very unevenly throughout the organization. Very confrontational and combative atmosphere. New ideas are not welcomed; people are not treated with respect.

Despite priding themselves as a "technical" company, MITRE completely disrespects their technical staff. That is, people with soft PhDs in technical *sounding* fields like systems engineering or engineering management are briskly pushed through the ranks. Others who have hard PhDs in fields like physics or math languish---even if they are good communicators and work well with clients. Yet, on projects, guess who does all of the difficult technical lifting? Guess who has to constantly correct superiors on technical points? Guess who has to listen and nod heads to half-baked ideas from project leaders? There is, in fact, a disincentive to promote lower ranking technical people: they would take up more resources for the same hours on a fixed budget contract. Meanwhile, there is terrible upper management bloat, especially at the AC5 level. Usually, they are supposed to manage relationships, yet they completely fail at it. They often tell the client incorrect information, or they email a draft copy of a document to them before its been vetted. Meanwhile, the raise structure is designed to maintain the status quo. That is, having an “excellent year” and an “outstanding review” only earns you a fraction of a percentage point higher than the average raise. In fact, MITRE even boasts that they *try* to keep everyone very near each other. Where is the incentive to do good work, to excel? My take, there are four kinds of people who will flourish and love MITRE: 1) people near the end of their careers who want a stable job with good work life balance but care little about advancement, 2) people of low or mediocre talent who want to avoid competing with real talent, 3) people who think systems engineering is a real discipline (alternatively, people who like ridiculous certifications like Lean Six Sigma and Scrummaster), and 4) people who aren’t very technical but can talk like they are and can fool the weak minded. Those are not meant to be orthogonal categories. There is one kind of person who will absolutely wilt and loathe MITRE: anyone with at least half a brain. They are completely orthogonal to the previous four types of people.