MITRE reviews

It can take a while to advance and grow a career. Accordingly, salaries seem to grow very slowly.

The quality of managers is highly variable, and your group leader can make you or break you in a number of ways. Some group leaders are very flexible in terms of letting you find work, but others lay claim to a significant portion of your time, the result of which is that you may get assigned work that is either not challenging and/or not within your skill set. When the latter happens, the organization is not very forgiving in terms of inappropriate work assignments. As an extreme example, if an HR professional were asked to write a piece of software because no one else in the organization is available to do the work, that HR professional can expect a very poor performance review if they don't do the job of an expert software engineer---there is no calibration of expectations when staff are asked to do work in which they have no background. Moreover, there is generally no appreciation for staff who "take one for the team." In addition to group leader issues, the high level management (Level 6 and above) has a few bad seeds whose influence poisons the productivity of the organization. Good group leaders do their best to shield technical staff from incompetent high level management, but when they are unsuccessful, the result is staff who work on poorly defined, poorly led projects for which there is little to show at the end. Other cons: the health benefits are very expensive, and the overall compensation is low compared to industry.