Pros
Paid time off and retirement matching remain competitive. MITRE was a pioneer in teleworking and other accommodations to make work-life balance better, and it is largely still a good place for that.
Cons
When longtime CEO Al Grasso retired, a new executive team swept in eager to make a lot of changes. Change isn't necessarily a bad thing, but so far what we've seen hasn't inspired a lot of confidence. We just went through a disgracefully poorly managed round of layoffs in corporate operations. Layoffs are never exactly fun to go through, but when done well, they can be healthy and leave the organization more efficient. Not just from a cost standpoint either: a healthy layoff gets rid of people who are slowing the organization down. But that's not clearly the case here. We really miss a lot of the people who either retired early or were shown the door, and it's harder for the organization to be effective without them. But worst of all was the feckless, drawn-out way this was all handled. A department head and even a director with 30 years' experience were laid off right along with individual contributors. Even if there's good reason to get rid of people in those positions, it's cowardly to use a RIF as a vehicle for that. Maybe that seemed neat and efficient from a labor lawyer's perspective, but consider what that does for morale: there's a Game of Thrones-like sense of dread among the staff because not only could any of us be next, but we don't even believe that we can get reliable information from middle management because they're all evidently standing on trap doors too. It effectively cuts off any way to quell rumors and move on. In a relatively strong job market like we currently have, I worry we'll lose even more of our best people who'd rather not work under the current COO. We're watching a lot of the things that made MITRE such an excellent place to work 10 years ago get eroded away.