MITRE reviews

Poor leadership, lack of accountability, many employees do very little work, extremely hard to get promoted or a raise, lack of innovation

In the past two years, executive leadership has seemingly turned on employees, issuing a string of indefensibly damaging policy changes — laying off essential staff, slashing benefits, cutting PTO; even pointless, punitive things like removing all the trashcans from the office and forcing overhead staff to use up all their vacation time on a particular week. When a poorly-conceived policy fails, rather than walk it back, leadership simply suppresses the evidence. The CEO claimed that the company was in "excellent financial health" weeks after laying off half the finance team. Last year, they removed questions about senior management from employee satisfaction surveys, closed those surveys days before cutting benefits, then claimed victory when the numbers were only mediocre instead of accurate. It's difficult to attribute it all to incompetence. If someone were to make it their mission to drive an established, successful business into the ground as quickly as possible, an optimal strategy would resemble MITRE's current operating plan.