Pros
The non-profit mission of the company and culture of technical excellence and sharing knowledge have enabled MITRE employees to make wonderful contributions to the US Federal Government, as well as the broader community - especially in the field of cybersecurity through free public contributions such as CVE and ATT&CK.
Cons
The current CEO has repeatedly enacted policy changes that negatively affect staff, and only provides notice 2-3 weeks ahead of the change. The communications from the CEO are unpredictable, unreliable, and delivered in a condescending tone during all-hands calls. These policy changes are often poorly thought-through, and the CEO has often had to amend the policy change within days of its announcement. Recently, 2 weeks before Thanksgiving, he announced that the entire company would shut down for Thanksgiving week, with all employees needing to use vacation time. The next week at his all-hands, he retracted the policy verbally during the call in response to negative feedback from employees. However, select Senior VPs decided to enact the policy anyway the following day. This left employees scrambling to manage deadlines, family schedules and vacation bank balances. This January, the CEO announced a new vacation policy reducing vacation accrual rates and maximum vacation accrual; along with an elimination of the option to sell back unused vacation time each year. Again, this was announced with little notice, and employees were given about 20 business days to continue to deliver on deadline, while attempting to bring their leave balances down by up to 80 hours to continue accruing leave. Average raises across the company for employees have been approximately 3%, while CEO compensation has risen over 50% from 2018 to 2020 according to propublica.