MITRE is a non-profit and suffers from a lack of simplicity that comes with the direct drive for more money. It is extremely hard for MITRE employees to determine what things they might do to best contribute to corporate success. It is similarly hard for management to identify and reward those things that have contributed success. There's no simple metric. Everyone's doing their best in this framework, but it's just difficult.
A recent survey encouraged people to identify technical leaders and asked if people were being encouraged to do technical work. One need not ask these questions when those two things are happening sufficiently. MITRE's technical base might be eroding.
Plenty of staff appear to merely attend work and don't strive to get something done. If it happens it happens, if it doesn't, it doesn't. Perhaps this is a consequence of the lack of accounting systems for corporate success. The drive to achieve something is underrepresented in this otherwise very, very intelligent collection of people. It's a herd of cats.
