Organizations rise and fall on leadership, and unfortunately MITRE is in a position to do much more of the latter.
Over the course of ten years I observed a marked decline in all dimensions of organizational effectiveness. Towards the end of my tenure I saw a high performing teams repeatedly, quantitatively, and professionally identify systemic business risks to inexperienced senior executives only to be condescendingly advised to, "make it work" with no further explanation.
There is no logical basis to undercut directly funded multi-million dollar business contracts in pursuit of internally funded experiments that consistently fail to produce any new lines of business. Yet, that is the decision I saw being made again and again.
The last years of my tenure saw a bewildering array of strange and inexplicable corporate decisions including...
- Company wide request to take personal vacation over thanksgiving week, which was rescinded 48 hours later
- Massive headcount reductions (my team lost upwards of 50% of its staff), followed by arguments that my teams location in org had always been "safe"
- Obsession with RTO policies including individual employee monitoring even for teams that self-organized around behaviors that complied with policy
- Inconsistent RTO policy application across company
- Reduction of B-time for 10+ year tenured employees
- Doubling of health care costs
- Huge investment in virtual reality technology that no government client asked for and is now just sitting playing demo videos on loop
- Defunding of compute infrastructure that supports active government client contracts
In addition to all that, the economic compensation structure is unbalanced to the extreme in order to provide the most lucrative retirement benefits allowable by law. Approximately 20% of my income was locked up in the retirement program either through my contributions or matching. When monthly expenses required reducing those savings, HR informed me that a certain level of retirement savings is a mandatory requirement for 5+ year employees so I could not access that income to pay for monthly expenses. It very much seemed like my labor was being used to fund overly generous retirement benefits for late-career ex-government bureaucrats.
After 10 years at a company, you get to know it pretty well. By the end I learned that the platitudes about MITRE's employee appreciation are not worth the poster board they are written on.
This organization is in crisis. It has no coherent business growth strategy, its existing clients are unhappy, its compensation structure is unbalanced and non-competitive, it is systematically alienating its most valuable staff, and its senior leadership is in denial about all of those things.
