Pros
The company is mission oriented not-for-profit operating for the public interest. I'm proud to be here. I've always felt empowered to do what is right and my judgement is trusted. Work-life balance is valued. Mark Peters, the new CEO, is a breath of fresh air, and the first MITRE CEO I've seen in 24 years at MITRE who is straight talking, honest, and humble without platitudes. He gave those of us with 9 years of service or more the 5 vacation days back. Since taking over from the previous CEO who left the company practically in ruins financially, Mark has had to navigate us through DOGE. Though 20% of the company had to be RIFed and morale has been in the crapper, since we've all seen friends lose their jobs, he handled it well in my opinion. Throughout, he was humble, honest, and empathetic, yet he made the tough decisions that needed to be made. This year we finally having the reorg that should have happened 20 years ago. While I expect some pain, it will hopefully eliminate the parochialism that has plagued much of MITRE in the past.and strengthen us moving forward. Our future looks bright as long as DOGE is really over. Also, we're aggressively hiring.
Cons
I struggle a lot with IT, the network, and my computer. Sometimes I have to wait some time before I can do any work because some IT process has taken over my Windows machine and it's not responsive to the keyboard. Sometimes I just need to reboot for no good reason. We sometimes joke that the IT motto must be "if you can do your job, we're not doing ours". Seriously, I recognize that MITRE is constantly under cyberattack and all of the layers of protection are necessary, but that doesn't make it less frustrating when it's hindering work. I could seriously use a machine with more resources like RAM and a network connection with more bandwidth.