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.