MITRE reviews

The work policy is not flexible, project work can be volatile and hard to secure internally, the demographic skews older so new employees/college grads may struggle finding peers. MITRE’s National Security sector has a strange relationship with the government where they try to predict what it wants in advance without actually knowing (mainly due to bad communication), causing engineers, IT, cybersecurity, and software people to start and scrap efforts/concepts in a hindering way instead of streamlining the workflow (even when accounting for necessary security procedures and strong usage of agile project management).

I was allured by the fact that MITRE is not-for-profit and the potentially impactful work I'd be doing when I first joined. After a couple years of working here, I feel disillusioned. I am not thrilled by the lack of training and management. If you require *some* leadership and management to perform well at work, this might not be the place for you. Although you have much autonomy and sometimes even a stake in the work you do, you're sort of winging it every day and leaders/senior step are often too busy to help you or respond to you. It's easy to feel like a burden if you aren't 100% clear on what you should be doing. The senior leadership is really out-of-touch. Considering they lead a company of engineers, they are surprisingly condescending and treat their employees like they don't have the brains to put two and two together. The lack of transparency from senior leadership has been a recurring theme. This includes lack of transparency on benefits changes, RTO changes, and RIFs. The RTO effort has also been a joke. Leadership insists on forcing people to badge-in to a MITRE location even when they have no reason to be there. They also tried to implement "core days" so that everyone from the same sector is in the office on the same day despite lack of space and lack of need. Finally, the fact that you have to find a job within a job is stressful. They are trying to fix this but you still have to apply and potentially be declined for work. Not my idea of fun.