Draper reviews about "upper management"

Poor untrustworthy upper management. Cheat the government consistently. Many quality people are leaving.

Draper is a bad place to try to grow a career. As a practice, they only promote people who have led successful projects (i.e., projects that led to follow-on revenue). There is no path to promotion for people who choose to focus on technical work or for people who agree to lead riskier projects less certain of successful follow-on funding. When they want upper level technical staff they hire from outside and do not look to advance their own people. Communication has generally been horrible between upper management and the rest of the company. However, we just got a new CEO (in Oct 2014) and hopefully that is going to change. There is very little support for software engineering - IT caters only to administrative and management functions and it is very difficult to use any current software tools, packages, etc. that are available to enable better software development.

The hiring in upper management is run more by personality than talent.

--People coast by while doing virtually no work. Working at Draper feels like being in a "study hall" sometimes. The pay is great, but the work is completely unfulfilling. --Far too much organizational inertia. Draper spends a ton of money creating advertisements that imply that they are on the bleeding edge of technology, but in reality they are afraid of change. --Draper puts a cap on the number of employees at each level, so you have to wait your turn even if you're out-performing your peers. There are people who have been doing great work and have been there for 10+ years that are still at the level where they were hired in at. It's very hard to get a promotion. --Draper does not provide real resources to do research. They used to have an on-site library where you could order books and research papers, but they got rid of that to save money. --The culture is terrible. People get by on "security through obscurity," and upper management can't see through it.

- If you screw up really bad, you most likely will get promoted. - New CEO cares more about appearance of building then profitability - New CEO is total snowflake that wants to save the world on employees dime - About 10% of staff carry the other 90% - IT is only about patriotism, if you were not friends with the CIO before Draper, you will never get promoted. - IT never has money now because of mistakes of upper management. No training or raises for some time now. - Parking fees increasing 1000% next year, some say to raise money.

Depending on your area of expertise, you may end up in a department that is new or lacking in a lot of steady work coming in, leading to a lot of "dry spells" where competition for good work gets a little heated and political. It doesn't feel good. I am ambitious and hard working, and I often felt very replaceable, under valued, and discouraged to seek leadership positions because of my place in "line" waiting for them. Or I was so overwhelmed with too many projects that my days were literally wall-to-wall meetings. Work is very network-based which actually wasn't much of a problem to find work...until it was. People (including me) hoard good projects because it always feels like the rug may be pulled out on funding or staffing levels. People keep secrets on available work or who they'd like to do what. Staffing procedures were still a bit in flux when I left. Lots of reorgs, desk changes due to construction, lots of old guard vs. new stuff that I was very glad to leave behind. People that excel here seem to either be VERY complacent or very "in" with management. Also diversity and inclusion efforts to change culture were lacking (although hopefully have grown by now).