MITRE Reviews

Current Employee – been working at MITRE

Pros – The benefits package can't be beat. The PTOB is one of the best around and the retirement package is difficult to replicate elsewhere. Depending on where you work in the corporation, you can work on some amazing new technologies or really make a difference.

Cons – Upper management tends to take care of high level employees, not the ones actually doing the work in the trenches. The corporate culture is a bit odd compared to for profit companies.

Advice to Senior Management – The reorg was handled poorly. High level employees were taken very good care of but low level employees were left out in the cold. When the decisions were questions, authority was used as a club.

The Konexxa survey results were incredibly surprising. Everyone that I work with believed that the results were too optimistic and did not represent the real view of employees.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at MITRE

Pros – MITRE provides very good benefits, a reasonable salary (not location specific), allows telework, and respects the work-life balance we all need. You do get to work on some pretty cool tasks ... if you're lucky. Work environment, support staff and computing equipment is all good to very good which can make your work life much easier. High percentage of staff with advanced degrees.

Cons – The performance review and salary administration is a mess that many try to avoid even dealing with. Management consists of previously good technical people that refuse to be managers and want to keep being technical staff. Management is scared to deliver the bad news or make the tough decisions. If they ignore it, hopefully it will go away. If you aren't part of the in crowd, good luck getting on the good projects or getting anything like independent R&D type activities. But once you've got it, you'll have it year after year. Dead weight stays around for far too long.

Advice to Senior Management – Get involved and know what's actually happening down here in the gutter. Kick middle-management in the rear or out the door. Stop patting yourselves on the back there are plenty of problems to take care of.

Current Employee – been working at MITRE

Pros – Mitre is a friendly place to work and has the same pluses as many other government related jobs. There is a high level of job security, which means you have to try pretty hard to be fired. You're not expected to work any more than 40 hours a week which leaves you time for doing things outside of work. The benefits are better than average and they have a very good retirement plan. They offer around 24 paid vacation days a year for a new hire (more after 5 years of service) and they are very willing to let you take these vacation days whenever you want.

Cons – There are really two major downsides to working at MITRE. First, you work for a non-profit organization that is not allowed to make or sell products. This means that you end up working on small prototyping efforts at best (dealing with government contractors at worst) that are never allowed to mature into something you can be proud of. The second major downside is the politics and bureaucratic mess that the government makes. The politics are frustrating because you find that there are many people in charge not because they're good at what they do, but because they knew the right person or worked in the right branch of the military. This leads to many frustrations if you're just trying to solve challenging technical problems. Much too frequently funding is cut or "redirected" because someone new in a higher up position simply can't understand why your work would be important or feels that you aren't branching out enough and including enough people from other departments or MITRE's off-site offices for your work to be valuable. The bureaucratic mess isn't even isolated to management or projects. If I need to order something for work as simple as a battery, mouse, etc. the expected turn around time is 4 weeks. This is not something that's really good for productivity.

Advice to Senior Management – Understand your company. Figure out what your employees are doing and why they enjoy it. There are many talented people that come and go at MITRE because their work really doesn't make any impact. Senior management needs to spend less time working on their own projects and more time bringing the work that their employees are doing to the right people so that what they do can be used where it's actually needed. It's too much of a burden to ask someone to do all the technical footwork, all the networking, and all the management of a project knowing that at any time their funding could be cut for no apparent reason. Senior management needs to help be facilitators in this sense and not extra road blocks.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at MITRE full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – I've been fortunate to provide MITRE-unique services to sponsors

Cons – Too many cost shaving activities that used to differentiate MITRE from other companies. Less office space for each employee, reduced our retirement benefits, reduced our leave, reduced the amount of leave we can carry over, new two week timecard makes it looks as though you get more flexibility but managers have been told to limit approval to 4 hours a month. That's flexible????? That's probably why we're no longer on the Fortune Best Companies to work for anymore.

Advice to Senior Management – Don't use Glass Door as a measuring stick....I never heard of it until talk about the new timecards mentioned it. If we are not a

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at MITRE full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Ability to work with some great, motivated, intellectually honest scientists and engineers.

Cons – Difficult to move within the company. Top heavy management. Focus on revenue generation over quality in too many groups, becoming part of culture.

Advice to Senior Management – Focus on retention as opposed to bringing in and paying more to new talent. Focus on the core value of public benefit vs. the path towards becoming a body shop.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at MITRE

Pros – Many smart employees committed to public service, great IT infrastructure and physical plant, good opportunities for professional development.

Cons – Poor managers promoted into positions of authority, creating a highly negative work environment. The result is that talented and committed staff leave to seek employment elsewhere.

Advice to Senior Management – Leadership needs to implement 360 degree reviews of all management and eliminate the bad apples. The company is squandering its most valuable resource by allowing this pattern to continue.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at MITRE

Pros – Good work life balance, good IT support.

Cons – Leadership does not focus on what is happening to employees working at sponsor sites. Blame is placed on the employee if negative information is received, and not on examining sponsor issues or reluctance to accept potentially difficult recommendations. This style promotes banal employee work, where the effort is focused on giving advice that is not "too controversial."

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at MITRE

Pros – Work with higher level sponsors, if you are good.
MITRE Institute for training.
Previously good benedits.

Cons – As the other reviews said, no promotions are available.
Salarieis are languished.
Management is old and stogy. Would never make it in a commercial environment. They're not going anywhere, however.
Too much administration, no marketing.

Advice to Senior Management – Get rid of the old dead wood managers.
Implement more marketing, because the company is vulnernable to downturns.
How about good salaries, not 50th percentile?

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at MITRE

Pros – Work/life balance, good retirement matching.

Cons – Lots of incompetent and non-technical managers for an engineering company that is one of the "best places to work." Limited feedback going up the chain (no 360) so terrible managers and department heads tend to stick around forever (as others have said, they'd be basically unemployable anywhere else). Lots of talk about ethics and values but very little behind it when bad things actually happen.

Advice to Senior Management – Listen to employees, not just managers. Why are benefits being cut when you can get rid of useless employees to cut expenses?

Current Employee – been working at MITRE

Pros – Colleagues at MITRE are among the smartest people employed in government service. At MITRE, one is reminded daily that only 40 hours per week are required. The people and the short hours are the best reasons for a person to work here. The benefits are good. The campus is located in a safe area. The Boston and Washington areas offer broad opportunities for culture and recreation and many of the communities are affluent.

Cons – 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.