Pros
Work ends when I close my laptop. Paycheck arrives on time. Able to be flexible with work schedule for the most part.
Cons
Unless you plan on working at this company for the rest of your life, joining MITRE as a software engineer is career suicide. There are no code reviews, no design reviews, no writing tests, no operations experience for software engineers, no thought is given to scalability, maintainability, testability, or reliability. I understand that the work MITRE does is mostly proof-of-concept/prototyping and is not developing and maintaining production systems, but the bar for software development here is so low it is shameful. Any critical feedback on a design or implementation is taken as a personal attack and triggers an emotional response. Project leaders have no idea how to gather requirements or shape work for software projects and end up over promising and under delivering for sponsors often with wildly absurd timelines that seem to come entirely out of the blue. And the requirement of finding work at this company means that I'm scared to push back on anything in fear that I'll be cut from a project or something. Despite the mostly great things I had heard about MITRE prior to joining, I cannot express enough how disappointed I am in this company. Not to mention all the benefit cuts that have happened in just the year since I've started. I thought that I would be proud to work at a place like MITRE but now I'm not so sure.