Pros
1. Incredibly impactful work and cutting-edge projects 2. Lots of opportunities to grow professionally and get a graduate degree concurrently 3. Generally great direct management (group leads, department managers, division directors, most project leads) 4. Generally great work-life balance culture (with the notable exception of new hybrid/telework policies described below) I love working here! My coworkers are fantastic, and the projects I'm working on are interesting and meaningful.
Cons
1. Morale has tanked in the past year due to recent decisions made by executive leadership 2. Senior leadership (board of directors and executive team) are increasingly showing signs of being incredibly disconnected and/or oblivious to the work their employees actually do 3. Sometimes people (esp. project leads) who are jerks still get promoted and protected, just because they're effective or have good connections; this certainly is a minority of project leads though 4. Salaries are often lower than at other tech companies that are competing for the same talent; benefits are ok but don't really make up for it To expand on point (2): Historically, MITRE has had a very strong flexible work structure that put trust in its employees and provided the opportunity to be a full-time teleworker if needed and compatible with your project work. Ironically, after being told for months how impressive and productive we all were during COVID, leadership has begun revoking teleworker agreements of anyone within 50 miles of an office or site and forcing them to physically come in to the office, despite the fact that many of these employees having incredibly good track records doing work fully remote in the past, and that 50 miles in the DMV area can be a couple hours of commuting each way due to traffic. (This also goes against our own health analytics teams' COVID-related guidance). Additionally, instead of just trusting their hybrid employees to do the right thing and come in when needed (like in the past), they've now mandated that these employees must come in 2-3 days a week. This is after they took offices from anyone coming in fewer than 4 days a week and converted all offices to single occupancy, so now there aren't even enough "hotel" offices for everyone to have places to sit. Executive leadership has also repeatedly used the word "transactional" to describe (in their view) the only type of work that can be done remotely - do they not realize that some of their highest performing, innovative contributors at MITRE were already teleworkers and have been for years? Or that most of us spend our entire day on phone/video calls with teams distributed across the two primary campuses and the rest of the country? It's only a very small portion of MITRE that works on projects that are completely co-located. Beyond the new hybrid/telework policy, leadership has a habit of announcing new policies late either on live CEO calls with a limited audience, or late on Friday afternoons without any sort of warning or reason given for the change. This has led to employees feeling caught off-guard and with a lack of trust in leadership.