Government job: slow-moving, great benefits, reasonable hours, hard to get fired - Associate Technical Staff MIT Lincoln Laboratory Employee Review

The lab doesn't focus much on management, and as a consequence, the management quality is pretty patchy. There are so many possible pitfalls when doing research--one can attack uninteresting questions, or fail to have a clear question to answer, or fail to design the experiment in a way that will answer the question. Further, research is slow, and requires patience at the right moments and tenacity at others. I've never been on a project at Lincoln that was successful, and it was always a management problem. I don't want to knock Lincoln too hard, as these are common problems with research: without clear market feedback, it's really easy to end up in the weeds. But for whatever reason, we spent a lot of time in the weeds. Note that the lab is a BIG place, and this was just my experience in division 8. I would say that it is likely to be completely irrelevant to your experience in other divisions. Also, there is no such thing as job mobility for assistant or associate staff, at least in division 8. This is a place run by PhDs for PhDs. If you don't have one, you just do what you're told. That's not the worst thing in the world, but it might not be ideal for someone young and ambitious.