The main issue that I have with Draper is the mechanism it uses to allocate employees to projects. Imagine that you are an employee and technically, you are a salaried employee so the number of hours you report is always 40 hours per week, no more no less. Now imagine a scenario where your manager is 100% NOT responsible for finding or assigning tasks for you to work on, but every week, you are required to fill in a timesheet that states which projects you worked for how many hours.
Every project is managed by an ad-hoc team of people from different groups, divisions, etc… and when it comes to finding projects to work on, you will have to seek them out and audition your skillset and experience to them. Every little group that forms around a project has a metaphorical “pile of money” and you will need to sell yourself to these teams sand hope that enough people “bid for your time” so you have 40 hours’ worth of tasks per week.
Managers will praise this style of deflecting responsibility off themselves and call it “a Matrix organization” and to their credit, this system is “useful” in that if they are ever audited by a grant issuer, they can show exactly how many hours was spent on labor per project, but it forces you to seek out work to do within the company. The only people management spends time with are the “golden boys” or you IF you have trouble finding the full 40 hours’ worth of work.
Fiefdoms within the company are how projects are managed and this is the system you will have to navigate in order to find work. If you are lucky, you will build a good reputation via “word of mouth” and people may seek you out to work on projects. BE WARNED that whether people like you or feel they can relate to you has a much bigger impact on your “reputation” then technical competency. Other reviews have alluded to this, and I MUST reiterate because it’s true, the entire company is a textbook example of the Peter Principle.
