MITRE reviews

MITREs management continues to decline. First, a catastrophic reorg in 2020 when several hundred staff were unceremoniously laid off without thought of the consequences for staffing needs, leading to 18 months of vacancies. NOW, they have such cost overruns, they are mandating staff take vacation because they can't meet payroll. There is zero accountability from the C suite --utter radio silence. How do they think this will resonate with our Federal sponsors? It is not exactly confidence inspiring. There is a focus on optics that undermines the ability to make substantive management improvements: the topic du jour is "belonging". What would make employees feel valued is transparency and accountability from management; people are far more attached to vacation (and sick leave-- also very limited) than to free Starbucks and corporate swag, or "bonding opportunities". MITRE will continue to lose its ability to attract top talent and hemorrhage senior staff if they don't regain focus on what matters - doing great, science driven research in the public interest guided by fiscally responsible policies.

Most of the work you do amounts to a powerpoint presentation and/or a demo and no actual operational impact even if its considered impactful work by upper management. It's unfortunate that for a large number of projects out there, its more important for you to charge your hours than it is to actual contribute meaningful work. Instead of getting fired for not doing your work, you get kicked off the project once they find someone that can fill in your hours, and the cycle continues. Sometimes you're left charging hours on the project until the end of the year. Every few years, MITRE completely changes their "specialty" and then expects everyone to become an expert in that field. This includes spending the effort and energy just to change department names and project names. Security/cyber seems to be the current theme. Some of the people at MITRE are true masters of verbal facade to make things sound really good to the customer. Some people unfortunately just copy and paste materials from vendors and pre-existing documents to claim the work as their own. Management is not very in sync with employees. Your department head probably has very little insight into what you do. If you're lucky your group leader is in sync with your work but has little control over your salary increases.