MITRE reviews

I was skeptical about the value of Glassdoor until I read the recent reviews, which are spot-on as far as I'm concerned. Where to start? Many reviews here suggest that the company started going downhill when Al Grasso left and Jason Providakes took over; but the problem actually started with Al. On the one hand, he did good things to make the company more unified; on the other hand, he instituted a culture of glad-handing nonsense that has infected everything the company says to its own employees (witness the content-free responses by MITRE's Employee Experience Team on Glassdoor; believe it or not, this is how MITRE speaks internally to us, its employees, on a daily basis). The hiring disaster of a year ago was a consequence, I believe, of inexperienced portfolio managers doing a crappy job of estimating demand, and I don't know whether the company learned anything from it (certainly, they've shut up about it this year, that's for sure). The expensive moonshot and platform efforts are both bleeding money from the work that we're actually supposed to be doing; they're vanity efforts which are poorly overseen and almost certainly doomed to failure. And don't get me started about MITRE's self-congratulatory non-repair of the compensation mess. Of the 24 people listed on MITRE's executive team page, I have a reasonable familiarity with 8 of them; 5 of them I trust, one I wouldn't give you a dime for, and two of them are actively disastrous - and unfortunately, those two are effectively running the company.

Some sea change occurred in the mid-to-late 2010s -- never widely publicized, something possibly like "McKinsey/Bain/BCG consultants told MITRE its business model was dwindling, that age, costs, and available govt appetites would make this model non-viable by ~2030" -- ever since then, senior leadership has been frantically pinwheeling through let's-try-private-sector-biz, let's-try-cheaper-college-campus-hubs, let's-try-junior-DevOps-projects, let's-try-a-different-logo, let's-try-VC-spinoff-alliances. The new experiments are not faring well. The trusty reliable old business is also not faring well, due to de-prioritization, or overarching demand factors, or both. It's not clear where MITRE will turn next -- back to its 1980s Cold War competency, forward to some Hail-Mary entrepreneurship, possibly even divestiture?