FFRDCs

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:CNA is touting AI... but because of that, it may not need some staff in both the FFRDC and IPR departments.

Also, CNA needs to reduce overhead to be competitive in their gov contracts (IPR-side).

Isn’t AI an opportunity for the FFRDCs? Impartial, conflict-free advice to help the federal government determine how to best leverage/harness/introduce new technologies into aging infrastructure and workstreams.

Yes, but then do you need a lot of research/analytical staff?

RAND cut staff (11% layoffs in addition to buyouts/quiet firing) and is hiring a LOT of seasonal student interns right now. It looks like they are moving away from using full-time research staff to interns who use AI. Is it cheaper? Probably. Would I trust AI-slop reports and memos they deliver to my office? Not a chance.

What's the last thing your office did substantially differently because of a RAND report?

Their work on defense acquisition reform has been very helpful to my office on more than one occasion. Interns w/ ChatGPT, I'd gues, would not be as useful to us. I could be wrong

What was helpful to you? Was it key findings like "the United States has changing national priorities", or more like "managing the acquisition cost of systems is a challenge for DoD"? What did you do differently? Defense acquisition reform is clearly going so well, so which part of that can we thank RAND for?

We use a lot of the space acquisition work by RAND in my office.

Anything open you can recommend?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:CNA is touting AI... but because of that, it may not need some staff in both the FFRDC and IPR departments.

Also, CNA needs to reduce overhead to be competitive in their gov contracts (IPR-side).

Isn’t AI an opportunity for the FFRDCs? Impartial, conflict-free advice to help the federal government determine how to best leverage/harness/introduce new technologies into aging infrastructure and workstreams.

Yes, but then do you need a lot of research/analytical staff?

RAND cut staff (11% layoffs in addition to buyouts/quiet firing) and is hiring a LOT of seasonal student interns right now. It looks like they are moving away from using full-time research staff to interns who use AI. Is it cheaper? Probably. Would I trust AI-slop reports and memos they deliver to my office? Not a chance.

What's the last thing your office did substantially differently because of a RAND report?

Their work on defense acquisition reform has been very helpful to my office on more than one occasion. Interns w/ ChatGPT, I'd gues, would not be as useful to us. I could be wrong

What was helpful to you? Was it key findings like "the United States has changing national priorities", or more like "managing the acquisition cost of systems is a challenge for DoD"? What did you do differently? Defense acquisition reform is clearly going so well, so which part of that can we thank RAND for?

GER staff appear to be posting. lol

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can you please expand on "giving up trash cans"?

Last year, MITRE took away individual trash cans in offices, requiring staff to use centralized trash/recycling in the common kitchen areas. We assume this was a cost-cutting measure to reduce custodial staff, but leadership guised the change as part of a “green” initiative. Leadership often does that, for example framing “return to office” as an effort to increase innovation instead of leveling with employees that we have significant facilities expenses within our wrap rate that need to be justified to our government sponsors.

This was justified as a pursuit of some sort of LEED certification to reduce waste. To be fair, private sector companies do this, or try to, as well. In reality the money was just funneled to sustainability, etc. The “sustainability” vp and HR nutcase who dreamed up this and other mad schemes while giving themselves massive raises were fired by the new CEO who is trying to cleaning house and bring back sanity.

I don’t understand how the same finance team that got MITRE into this mess hasn’t been impacted at all by the “cleaning house”

I’d like to understand why they still gave out merit raises to senior managers this year. What targets did they meet? Tone deaf company.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I don’t understand how the same finance team that got MITRE into this mess hasn’t been impacted at all by the “cleaning house”

I’d like to understand why they still gave out merit raises to senior managers this year. What targets did they meet? Tone deaf company.

How do you know what the compensation decisions were for senior managers? MITRE hasn’t even started its performance review (and compensation) process for this past year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:CNA is touting AI... but because of that, it may not need some staff in both the FFRDC and IPR departments.

Also, CNA needs to reduce overhead to be competitive in their gov contracts (IPR-side).

Isn’t AI an opportunity for the FFRDCs? Impartial, conflict-free advice to help the federal government determine how to best leverage/harness/introduce new technologies into aging infrastructure and workstreams.

Yes, but then do you need a lot of research/analytical staff?

RAND cut staff (11% layoffs in addition to buyouts/quiet firing) and is hiring a LOT of seasonal student interns right now. It looks like they are moving away from using full-time research staff to interns who use AI. Is it cheaper? Probably. Would I trust AI-slop reports and memos they deliver to my office? Not a chance.

What's the last thing your office did substantially differently because of a RAND report?

Their work on defense acquisition reform has been very helpful to my office on more than one occasion. Interns w/ ChatGPT, I'd gues, would not be as useful to us. I could be wrong

What was helpful to you? Was it key findings like "the United States has changing national priorities", or more like "managing the acquisition cost of systems is a challenge for DoD"? What did you do differently? Defense acquisition reform is clearly going so well, so which part of that can we thank RAND for?

GER staff appear to be posting. lol

No. Lots of people have criticisms of RAND who are not at RAND. In fact, not working at an organization you have significant criticisms of is actually a really normal thing to do!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can you please expand on "giving up trash cans"?

Last year, MITRE took away individual trash cans in offices, requiring staff to use centralized trash/recycling in the common kitchen areas. We assume this was a cost-cutting measure to reduce custodial staff, but leadership guised the change as part of a “green” initiative. Leadership often does that, for example framing “return to office” as an effort to increase innovation instead of leveling with employees that we have significant facilities expenses within our wrap rate that need to be justified to our government sponsors.

This was justified as a pursuit of some sort of LEED certification to reduce waste. To be fair, private sector companies do this, or try to, as well. In reality the money was just funneled to sustainability, etc. The “sustainability” vp and HR nutcase who dreamed up this and other mad schemes while giving themselves massive raises were fired by the new CEO who is trying to cleaning house and bring back sanity.

I don’t understand how the same finance team that got MITRE into this mess hasn’t been impacted at all by the “cleaning house”

I’d like to understand why they still gave out merit raises to senior managers this year. What targets did they meet? Tone deaf company.

The decisions of Senior Managers are not crippling the company, it’s Director and C-Suite level finance decisions that are the backbreaker.

And Merit raises are 3%, which is almost insulting. As if you get no raise.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:CNA is touting AI... but because of that, it may not need some staff in both the FFRDC and IPR departments.

Also, CNA needs to reduce overhead to be competitive in their gov contracts (IPR-side).

Isn’t AI an opportunity for the FFRDCs? Impartial, conflict-free advice to help the federal government determine how to best leverage/harness/introduce new technologies into aging infrastructure and workstreams.

Yes, but then do you need a lot of research/analytical staff?

RAND cut staff (11% layoffs in addition to buyouts/quiet firing) and is hiring a LOT of seasonal student interns right now. It looks like they are moving away from using full-time research staff to interns who use AI. Is it cheaper? Probably. Would I trust AI-slop reports and memos they deliver to my office? Not a chance.

What's the last thing your office did substantially differently because of a RAND report?

Their work on defense acquisition reform has been very helpful to my office on more than one occasion. Interns w/ ChatGPT, I'd gues, would not be as useful to us. I could be wrong

What was helpful to you? Was it key findings like "the United States has changing national priorities", or more like "managing the acquisition cost of systems is a challenge for DoD"? What did you do differently? Defense acquisition reform is clearly going so well, so which part of that can we thank RAND for?

GER staff appear to be posting. lol

No. Lots of people have criticisms of RAND who are not at RAND. In fact, not working at an organization you have significant criticisms of is actually a really normal thing to do!

Especially after laying off 11% of your experienced people and replacing them with summer interns.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can you please expand on "giving up trash cans"?

Last year, MITRE took away individual trash cans in offices, requiring staff to use centralized trash/recycling in the common kitchen areas. We assume this was a cost-cutting measure to reduce custodial staff, but leadership guised the change as part of a “green” initiative. Leadership often does that, for example framing “return to office” as an effort to increase innovation instead of leveling with employees that we have significant facilities expenses within our wrap rate that need to be justified to our government sponsors.

This was justified as a pursuit of some sort of LEED certification to reduce waste. To be fair, private sector companies do this, or try to, as well. In reality the money was just funneled to sustainability, etc. The “sustainability” vp and HR nutcase who dreamed up this and other mad schemes while giving themselves massive raises were fired by the new CEO who is trying to cleaning house and bring back sanity.

I don’t understand how the same finance team that got MITRE into this mess hasn’t been impacted at all by the “cleaning house”

I’d like to understand why they still gave out merit raises to senior managers this year. What targets did they meet? Tone deaf company.

The decisions of Senior Managers are not crippling the company, it’s Director and C-Suite level finance decisions that are the backbreaker.

And Merit raises are 3%, which is almost insulting. As if you get no raise.

Mitres whole review system is flawed.

Sr. Managers get 3% raise + up to 4% i forgot what's it's called. So really upto 7%.

And then the stupid ranking system. 85% of the company needs to be "Achieved" or lower. 10% can be "Significant Achievement" and 5% can be "Exceptional", per department. If you have a team of all stars, there's a lot of hurt feelings. It incentivezes you to hire below average people to ensure your all stars get good rankings.

O yeah, the significant gets like 0.5% more raise than achieved, so not even big money.

[Anonymous]

Many of Mitre’s so-called experts are visibly less knowledgable than our civil service people. We are forced to pay for Mitre by upper levels of DoD, even though they do not add value in our highly technical work. I wish they actually had more technical expertise, and a lot less fluff.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:CNA is touting AI... but because of that, it may not need some staff in both the FFRDC and IPR departments.

Also, CNA needs to reduce overhead to be competitive in their gov contracts (IPR-side).

Isn’t AI an opportunity for the FFRDCs? Impartial, conflict-free advice to help the federal government determine how to best leverage/harness/introduce new technologies into aging infrastructure and workstreams.

Yes, but then do you need a lot of research/analytical staff?

RAND cut staff (11% layoffs in addition to buyouts/quiet firing) and is hiring a LOT of seasonal student interns right now. It looks like they are moving away from using full-time research staff to interns who use AI. Is it cheaper? Probably. Would I trust AI-slop reports and memos they deliver to my office? Not a chance.

What's the last thing your office did substantially differently because of a RAND report?

Their work on defense acquisition reform has been very helpful to my office on more than one occasion. Interns w/ ChatGPT, I'd gues, would not be as useful to us. I could be wrong

What was helpful to you? Was it key findings like "the United States has changing national priorities", or more like "managing the acquisition cost of systems is a challenge for DoD"? What did you do differently? Defense acquisition reform is clearly going so well, so which part of that can we thank RAND for?

GER staff appear to be posting. lol

No. Lots of people have criticisms of RAND who are not at RAND. In fact, not working at an organization you have significant criticisms of is actually a really normal thing to do!

Great point! I’ve heard Jason say the same thing!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can you please expand on "giving up trash cans"?

Last year, MITRE took away individual trash cans in offices, requiring staff to use centralized trash/recycling in the common kitchen areas. We assume this was a cost-cutting measure to reduce custodial staff, but leadership guised the change as part of a “green” initiative. Leadership often does that, for example framing “return to office” as an effort to increase innovation instead of leveling with employees that we have significant facilities expenses within our wrap rate that need to be justified to our government sponsors.

This was justified as a pursuit of some sort of LEED certification to reduce waste. To be fair, private sector companies do this, or try to, as well. In reality the money was just funneled to sustainability, etc. The “sustainability” vp and HR nutcase who dreamed up this and other mad schemes while giving themselves massive raises were fired by the new CEO who is trying to cleaning house and bring back sanity.

I don’t understand how the same finance team that got MITRE into this mess hasn’t been impacted at all by the “cleaning house”

I’d like to understand why they still gave out merit raises to senior managers this year. What targets did they meet? Tone deaf company.

The decisions of Senior Managers are not crippling the company, it’s Director and C-Suite level finance decisions that are the backbreaker.

And Merit raises are 3%, which is almost insulting. As if you get no raise.

C suite and directors are getting raises this year? For what?

Individual contributors typically get 2-3% raises.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can you please expand on "giving up trash cans"?

Last year, MITRE took away individual trash cans in offices, requiring staff to use centralized trash/recycling in the common kitchen areas. We assume this was a cost-cutting measure to reduce custodial staff, but leadership guised the change as part of a “green” initiative. Leadership often does that, for example framing “return to office” as an effort to increase innovation instead of leveling with employees that we have significant facilities expenses within our wrap rate that need to be justified to our government sponsors.

This was justified as a pursuit of some sort of LEED certification to reduce waste. To be fair, private sector companies do this, or try to, as well. In reality the money was just funneled to sustainability, etc. The “sustainability” vp and HR nutcase who dreamed up this and other mad schemes while giving themselves massive raises were fired by the new CEO who is trying to cleaning house and bring back sanity.

I don’t understand how the same finance team that got MITRE into this mess hasn’t been impacted at all by the “cleaning house”

I’d like to understand why they still gave out merit raises to senior managers this year. What targets did they meet? Tone deaf company.

The decisions of Senior Managers are not crippling the company, it’s Director and C-Suite level finance decisions that are the backbreaker.

And Merit raises are 3%, which is almost insulting. As if you get no raise.

C suite and directors are getting raises this year? For what?

Individual contributors typically get 2-3% raises.

Typical? 5% for L1-L4, 3%+bonus (2%-6%) for L5-L7

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can you please expand on "giving up trash cans"?

Last year, MITRE took away individual trash cans in offices, requiring staff to use centralized trash/recycling in the common kitchen areas. We assume this was a cost-cutting measure to reduce custodial staff, but leadership guised the change as part of a “green” initiative. Leadership often does that, for example framing “return to office” as an effort to increase innovation instead of leveling with employees that we have significant facilities expenses within our wrap rate that need to be justified to our government sponsors.

This was justified as a pursuit of some sort of LEED certification to reduce waste. To be fair, private sector companies do this, or try to, as well. In reality the money was just funneled to sustainability, etc. The “sustainability” vp and HR nutcase who dreamed up this and other mad schemes while giving themselves massive raises were fired by the new CEO who is trying to cleaning house and bring back sanity.

I don’t understand how the same finance team that got MITRE into this mess hasn’t been impacted at all by the “cleaning house”

I’d like to understand why they still gave out merit raises to senior managers this year. What targets did they meet? Tone deaf company.

The decisions of Senior Managers are not crippling the company, it’s Director and C-Suite level finance decisions that are the backbreaker.

And Merit raises are 3%, which is almost insulting. As if you get no raise.

C suite and directors are getting raises this year? For what?

Individual contributors typically get 2-3% raises.

Typical? 5% for L1-L4, 3%+bonus (2%-6%) for L5-L7

Csuite / director (L7) / department manager (L6) merit bonuses have recently been tied to growth. See section j of the salary filings. Unclear what the metrics for success are under RIF conditions other than dodging employee questions and putting on a faux sad face during RIF calls.

[Anonymous]

https://www.effectivealtruism.org/opportunities/recdpEZzcEJn0RwpR

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can you please expand on "giving up trash cans"?

Last year, MITRE took away individual trash cans in offices, requiring staff to use centralized trash/recycling in the common kitchen areas. We assume this was a cost-cutting measure to reduce custodial staff, but leadership guised the change as part of a “green” initiative. Leadership often does that, for example framing “return to office” as an effort to increase innovation instead of leveling with employees that we have significant facilities expenses within our wrap rate that need to be justified to our government sponsors.

This was justified as a pursuit of some sort of LEED certification to reduce waste. To be fair, private sector companies do this, or try to, as well. In reality the money was just funneled to sustainability, etc. The “sustainability” vp and HR nutcase who dreamed up this and other mad schemes while giving themselves massive raises were fired by the new CEO who is trying to cleaning house and bring back sanity.

I don’t understand how the same finance team that got MITRE into this mess hasn’t been impacted at all by the “cleaning house”

I’d like to understand why they still gave out merit raises to senior managers this year. What targets did they meet? Tone deaf company.

The decisions of Senior Managers are not crippling the company, it’s Director and C-Suite level finance decisions that are the backbreaker.

And Merit raises are 3%, which is almost insulting. As if you get no raise.

C suite and directors are getting raises this year? For what?

Individual contributors typically get 2-3% raises.

Typical? 5% for L1-L4, 3%+bonus (2%-6%) for L5-L7

Csuite / director (L7) / department manager (L6) merit bonuses have recently been tied to growth. See section j of the salary filings. Unclear what the metrics for success are under RIF conditions other than dodging employee questions and putting on a faux sad face during RIF calls.

Agreed!