* Part of what being a "flat" organization means is that people simply take on more roles and responsibilities to make the whole organization work. This often leads to technical people being pushed into managerial roles against their will. So despite the title "Technical Staff," you're usually not doing something technical, and probably spending a lot of time creating PowerPoint (aka, Slideware).
* The pay is low, even when compared to peer organizations (e.g., MITRE). Also, the workload is always such that you are underpaid for the work that you do.
* The lab's mission is to "apply advanced technology to problems of national security;" however, we don't solve many of said problems and thus have questionable impact when you consider parts of the the lab that are less mature than say, radar. This fulfillment aspect is a huge problem. What exacerbates this is that Staff and Management don't truly seem all that interested in solving real problems. We seem principally interested in getting money and doing interesting-sounding work.
* There's an expectation for Tech Staff to become "expert" at some new thing without any allocation of projects/resources to that end. You're frequently split between many different projects that have you at varying percentages that the project leads generally do not respect. Some Tech Staff get lucky enough to be on a singly-themed effort for an extended period of time. They generally develop true expertise. However, this is the exception not the rule.
* Projects are frequently taken with too little money which strains staff and resources because we generally end up having to pull people from other projects to help complete the projects.
* Of all of the cool-sounding projects, maybe half of them are *actually* cool. When you dig down into what people are actually doing, you're frequently disappointed.
* If you decide you want to leave Lincoln Lab & the government work world, you will find this attempt to transition difficult, because what you do at the lab is so unique, there aren't very many suitors out there for you (unless, you're lucky enough to spend the vast majority of your time doing technical work).
