Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mitre recently furloughed many people - without pay - in lieu of a formal layoff. Management seems to be hoping a bunch of the lost work will return in coming months.

What about hssedi?

Looks like the IDIQ came in a few days ago. $400M, 3 years

https://app.g2xchange.com/fedciv/posts/mitre-attains-400m-dhs-st-security-systems-engineering-and-development-institute-hssedi-idiq

Smaller than expected. Who will do the work? Favored few remaining are not the best and brightest.

That's a 72% cut to ceiling. Yikes.

But also a reduction in PoP.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:CNA is also top-heavy...worthless.

I love how this one (I assume) disgruntled ex-CNAer periodically tries to jump into the middle of the RAND/Mitre bashing.

“Guuuys! Come on! CNA sucks too!”

“Who?”

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mitre recently furloughed many people - without pay - in lieu of a formal layoff. Management seems to be hoping a bunch of the lost work will return in coming months.

What about hssedi?

Looks like the IDIQ came in a few days ago. $400M, 3 years

https://app.g2xchange.com/fedciv/posts/mitre-attains-400m-dhs-st-security-systems-engineering-and-development-institute-hssedi-idiq

Smaller than expected. Who will do the work? Favored few remaining are not the best and brightest.

That's a 72% cut to ceiling. Yikes.

Given how top heavy they are, five to one ratio, the management will hoover all the overhead and fees and then still charge 10% to each task order, leaving the remaining ~30% to an army of early careers that will be hired into the labs. It will be very difficult to justify the high cost of MITRE when all they bring to the table are recent college grads who don’t know your mission and lack technical depth.

Yikes. With so many recent grade, do they think they are beltway consultants? While I worked there, everyone I worked with were already established folks who could hit the ground running.

I find MITRE to be the opposite. Too many old geezers with PhDs and not enough young innovative (and cheaper) engineers who can actually help government counterparts.

They think they've got great skills, I'll give you that. Unfortunately they aren't willing to do the work to gain domain knowledge. Much easier for an old PhD who knows the domain to learn torch.

I have worked with multiple PhDs who could not be bothered to not write spaghetti code, learn to make a pull request, etc. I've interviewed and not passed other ones who failed the most basic of Python or SQL questions.

I used to think that surely if you had a PhD, you can learn what you need to learn. That may be the case, but if you don't want to, you're not going to. And if you've made it this long while your field was changing and you were not, you don't want to.

And I've worked with a lot of narrowly focused software engineers who only care about clean, modular, commented code, that has to go through rigorous MRs where you nit pick on every little thing.

There's a time and a place for each. PhDs (painting with a broad stroke) are great at solving the hard technical problems. They won't make production software. But that's not what they're paid to do.

<--- not a PhD

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mitre recently furloughed many people - without pay - in lieu of a formal layoff. Management seems to be hoping a bunch of the lost work will return in coming months.

What about hssedi?

Looks like the IDIQ came in a few days ago. $400M, 3 years

https://app.g2xchange.com/fedciv/posts/mitre-attains-400m-dhs-st-security-systems-engineering-and-development-institute-hssedi-idiq

Smaller than expected. Who will do the work? Favored few remaining are not the best and brightest.

That's a 72% cut to ceiling. Yikes.

Given how top heavy they are, five to one ratio, the management will hoover all the overhead and fees and then still charge 10% to each task order, leaving the remaining ~30% to an army of early careers that will be hired into the labs. It will be very difficult to justify the high cost of MITRE when all they bring to the table are recent college grads who don’t know your mission and lack technical depth.

Yikes. With so many recent grade, do they think they are beltway consultants? While I worked there, everyone I worked with were already established folks who could hit the ground running.

I find MITRE to be the opposite. Too many old geezers with PhDs and not enough young innovative (and cheaper) engineers who can actually help government counterparts.

They think they've got great skills, I'll give you that. Unfortunately they aren't willing to do the work to gain domain knowledge. Much easier for an old PhD who knows the domain to learn torch.

I have worked with multiple PhDs who could not be bothered to not write spaghetti code, learn to make a pull request, etc. I've interviewed and not passed other ones who failed the most basic of Python or SQL questions.

I used to think that surely if you had a PhD, you can learn what you need to learn. That may be the case, but if you don't want to, you're not going to. And if you've made it this long while your field was changing and you were not, you don't want to.

If you're interviewing the phds, they are not the old employed phds prev mentioned.

The new stem hires do so much worse. They do everything thing in jupyter. Literally their "work" is a huge useless notebook. The old phds know how to archtect code, do cron and nohup. New hires don't know much of linux.

Not everything at Mitre was software in the past. They ought to have experts in areas like RF and EW, although maybe Mitre dropped technical work when they started their big IT focus. Even SDRs require substantial RF design knowledge - modulation, coding, resilience, LPx.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mitre recently furloughed many people - without pay - in lieu of a formal layoff. Management seems to be hoping a bunch of the lost work will return in coming months.

What about hssedi?

Looks like the IDIQ came in a few days ago. $400M, 3 years

https://app.g2xchange.com/fedciv/posts/mitre-attains-400m-dhs-st-security-systems-engineering-and-development-institute-hssedi-idiq

Smaller than expected. Who will do the work? Favored few remaining are not the best and brightest.

That's a 72% cut to ceiling. Yikes.

Given how top heavy they are, five to one ratio, the management will hoover all the overhead and fees and then still charge 10% to each task order, leaving the remaining ~30% to an army of early careers that will be hired into the labs. It will be very difficult to justify the high cost of MITRE when all they bring to the table are recent college grads who don’t know your mission and lack technical depth.

Yikes. With so many recent grade, do they think they are beltway consultants? While I worked there, everyone I worked with were already established folks who could hit the ground running.

I find MITRE to be the opposite. Too many old geezers with PhDs and not enough young innovative (and cheaper) engineers who can actually help government counterparts.

They think they've got great skills, I'll give you that. Unfortunately they aren't willing to do the work to gain domain knowledge. Much easier for an old PhD who knows the domain to learn torch.

I have worked with multiple PhDs who could not be bothered to not write spaghetti code, learn to make a pull request, etc. I've interviewed and not passed other ones who failed the most basic of Python or SQL questions.

I used to think that surely if you had a PhD, you can learn what you need to learn. That may be the case, but if you don't want to, you're not going to. And if you've made it this long while your field was changing and you were not, you don't want to.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mitre recently furloughed many people - without pay - in lieu of a formal layoff. Management seems to be hoping a bunch of the lost work will return in coming months.

What about hssedi?

Looks like the IDIQ came in a few days ago. $400M, 3 years

https://app.g2xchange.com/fedciv/posts/mitre-attains-400m-dhs-st-security-systems-engineering-and-development-institute-hssedi-idiq

Smaller than expected. Who will do the work? Favored few remaining are not the best and brightest.

That's a 72% cut to ceiling. Yikes.

Given how top heavy they are, five to one ratio, the management will hoover all the overhead and fees and then still charge 10% to each task order, leaving the remaining ~30% to an army of early careers that will be hired into the labs. It will be very difficult to justify the high cost of MITRE when all they bring to the table are recent college grads who don’t know your mission and lack technical depth.

Yikes. With so many recent grade, do they think they are beltway consultants? While I worked there, everyone I worked with were already established folks who could hit the ground running.

I find MITRE to be the opposite. Too many old geezers with PhDs and not enough young innovative (and cheaper) engineers who can actually help government counterparts.

They think they've got great skills, I'll give you that. Unfortunately they aren't willing to do the work to gain domain knowledge. Much easier for an old PhD who knows the domain to learn torch.

I have worked with multiple PhDs who could not be bothered to not write spaghetti code, learn to make a pull request, etc. I've interviewed and not passed other ones who failed the most basic of Python or SQL questions.

I used to think that surely if you had a PhD, you can learn what you need to learn. That may be the case, but if you don't want to, you're not going to. And if you've made it this long while your field was changing and you were not, you don't want to.

If you're interviewing the phds, they are not the old employed phds prev mentioned.

The new stem hires do so much worse. They do everything thing in jupyter. Literally their "work" is a huge useless notebook. The old phds know how to archtect code, do cron and nohup. New hires don't know much of linux.

I have both worked with and interviewed older PhDs. I have no older vs. younger or PhD vs. not PhD fight. From all of these, some are terrible and some are great, but I'm not assuming any degree of competence or ability to learn based on a degree.

I thought you were the 'old geezers' poster. It gave me a chuckle reading that he thinks younger engineers 'who can actually help government counterparts', but in truth they just don't know enough to know what they don't know.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mitre recently furloughed many people - without pay - in lieu of a formal layoff. Management seems to be hoping a bunch of the lost work will return in coming months.

What about hssedi?

Looks like the IDIQ came in a few days ago. $400M, 3 years

https://app.g2xchange.com/fedciv/posts/mitre-attains-400m-dhs-st-security-systems-engineering-and-development-institute-hssedi-idiq

Smaller than expected. Who will do the work? Favored few remaining are not the best and brightest.

That's a 72% cut to ceiling. Yikes.

Given how top heavy they are, five to one ratio, the management will hoover all the overhead and fees and then still charge 10% to each task order, leaving the remaining ~30% to an army of early careers that will be hired into the labs. It will be very difficult to justify the high cost of MITRE when all they bring to the table are recent college grads who don’t know your mission and lack technical depth.

Yikes. With so many recent grade, do they think they are beltway consultants? While I worked there, everyone I worked with were already established folks who could hit the ground running.

I find MITRE to be the opposite. Too many old geezers with PhDs and not enough young innovative (and cheaper) engineers who can actually help government counterparts.

They think they've got great skills, I'll give you that. Unfortunately they aren't willing to do the work to gain domain knowledge. Much easier for an old PhD who knows the domain to learn torch.

I have worked with multiple PhDs who could not be bothered to not write spaghetti code, learn to make a pull request, etc. I've interviewed and not passed other ones who failed the most basic of Python or SQL questions.

I used to think that surely if you had a PhD, you can learn what you need to learn. That may be the case, but if you don't want to, you're not going to. And if you've made it this long while your field was changing and you were not, you don't want to.

If you're interviewing the phds, they are not the old employed phds prev mentioned.

The new stem hires do so much worse. They do everything thing in jupyter. Literally their "work" is a huge useless notebook. The old phds know how to archtect code, do cron and nohup. New hires don't know much of linux.

I have both worked with and interviewed older PhDs. I have no older vs. younger or PhD vs. not PhD fight. From all of these, some are terrible and some are great, but I'm not assuming any degree of competence or ability to learn based on a degree.

Anonymous wrote:RAND just put out a report recommending China-Taiwan unification. Why?
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/10/28/taiwan-is-for-sale/

Anonymous wrote:...I'm not assuming any degree of competence or ability to learn based on a degree.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mitre recently furloughed many people - without pay - in lieu of a formal layoff. Management seems to be hoping a bunch of the lost work will return in coming months.

What about hssedi?

Looks like the IDIQ came in a few days ago. $400M, 3 years

https://app.g2xchange.com/fedciv/posts/mitre-attains-400m-dhs-st-security-systems-engineering-and-development-institute-hssedi-idiq

Smaller than expected. Who will do the work? Favored few remaining are not the best and brightest.

That's a 72% cut to ceiling. Yikes.

Given how top heavy they are, five to one ratio, the management will hoover all the overhead and fees and then still charge 10% to each task order, leaving the remaining ~30% to an army of early careers that will be hired into the labs. It will be very difficult to justify the high cost of MITRE when all they bring to the table are recent college grads who don’t know your mission and lack technical depth.

Yikes. With so many recent grade, do they think they are beltway consultants? While I worked there, everyone I worked with were already established folks who could hit the ground running.

I find MITRE to be the opposite. Too many old geezers with PhDs and not enough young innovative (and cheaper) engineers who can actually help government counterparts.

They think they've got great skills, I'll give you that. Unfortunately they aren't willing to do the work to gain domain knowledge. Much easier for an old PhD who knows the domain to learn torch.

I have worked with multiple PhDs who could not be bothered to not write spaghetti code, learn to make a pull request, etc. I've interviewed and not passed other ones who failed the most basic of Python or SQL questions.

I used to think that surely if you had a PhD, you can learn what you need to learn. That may be the case, but if you don't want to, you're not going to. And if you've made it this long while your field was changing and you were not, you don't want to.

If you're interviewing the phds, they are not the old employed phds prev mentioned.

The new stem hires do so much worse. They do everything thing in jupyter. Literally their "work" is a huge useless notebook. The old phds know how to archtect code, do cron and nohup. New hires don't know much of linux.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mitre recently furloughed many people - without pay - in lieu of a formal layoff. Management seems to be hoping a bunch of the lost work will return in coming months.

What about hssedi?

Looks like the IDIQ came in a few days ago. $400M, 3 years

https://app.g2xchange.com/fedciv/posts/mitre-attains-400m-dhs-st-security-systems-engineering-and-development-institute-hssedi-idiq

Smaller than expected. Who will do the work? Favored few remaining are not the best and brightest.

That's a 72% cut to ceiling. Yikes.

Given how top heavy they are, five to one ratio, the management will hoover all the overhead and fees and then still charge 10% to each task order, leaving the remaining ~30% to an army of early careers that will be hired into the labs. It will be very difficult to justify the high cost of MITRE when all they bring to the table are recent college grads who don’t know your mission and lack technical depth.

Yikes. With so many recent grade, do they think they are beltway consultants? While I worked there, everyone I worked with were already established folks who could hit the ground running.

I find MITRE to be the opposite. Too many old geezers with PhDs and not enough young innovative (and cheaper) engineers who can actually help government counterparts.

They think they've got great skills, I'll give you that. Unfortunately they aren't willing to do the work to gain domain knowledge. Much easier for an old PhD who knows the domain to learn torch.

I have worked with multiple PhDs who could not be bothered to not write spaghetti code, learn to make a pull request, etc. I've interviewed and not passed other ones who failed the most basic of Python or SQL questions.

I used to think that surely if you had a PhD, you can learn what you need to learn. That may be the case, but if you don't want to, you're not going to. And if you've made it this long while your field was changing and you were not, you don't want to.

If you're interviewing the phds, they are not the old employed phds prev mentioned.

The new stem hires do so much worse. They do everything thing in jupyter. Literally their "work" is a huge useless notebook. The old phds know how to archtect code, do cron and nohup. New hires don't know much of linux.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mitre recently furloughed many people - without pay - in lieu of a formal layoff. Management seems to be hoping a bunch of the lost work will return in coming months.

What about hssedi?

Looks like the IDIQ came in a few days ago. $400M, 3 years

https://app.g2xchange.com/fedciv/posts/mitre-attains-400m-dhs-st-security-systems-engineering-and-development-institute-hssedi-idiq

Smaller than expected. Who will do the work? Favored few remaining are not the best and brightest.

That's a 72% cut to ceiling. Yikes.

Given how top heavy they are, five to one ratio, the management will hoover all the overhead and fees and then still charge 10% to each task order, leaving the remaining ~30% to an army of early careers that will be hired into the labs. It will be very difficult to justify the high cost of MITRE when all they bring to the table are recent college grads who don’t know your mission and lack technical depth.

Yikes. With so many recent grade, do they think they are beltway consultants? While I worked there, everyone I worked with were already established folks who could hit the ground running.

I find MITRE to be the opposite. Too many old geezers with PhDs and not enough young innovative (and cheaper) engineers who can actually help government counterparts.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mitre recently furloughed many people - without pay - in lieu of a formal layoff. Management seems to be hoping a bunch of the lost work will return in coming months.

What about hssedi?

Looks like the IDIQ came in a few days ago. $400M, 3 years

https://app.g2xchange.com/fedciv/posts/mitre-attains-400m-dhs-st-security-systems-engineering-and-development-institute-hssedi-idiq

Smaller than expected. Who will do the work? Favored few remaining are not the best and brightest.

That's a 72% cut to ceiling. Yikes.

Given how top heavy they are, five to one ratio, the management will hoover all the overhead and fees and then still charge 10% to each task order, leaving the remaining ~30% to an army of early careers that will be hired into the labs. It will be very difficult to justify the high cost of MITRE when all they bring to the table are recent college grads who don’t know your mission and lack technical depth.

Yikes. With so many recent grade, do they think they are beltway consultants? While I worked there, everyone I worked with were already established folks who could hit the ground running.

I find MITRE to be the opposite. Too many old geezers with PhDs and not enough young innovative (and cheaper) engineers who can actually help government counterparts.

They think they've got great skills, I'll give you that. Unfortunately they aren't willing to do the work to gain domain knowledge. Much easier for an old PhD who knows the domain to learn torch.

I have worked with multiple PhDs who could not be bothered to not write spaghetti code, learn to make a pull request, etc. I've interviewed and not passed other ones who failed the most basic of Python or SQL questions.

I used to think that surely if you had a PhD, you can learn what you need to learn. That may be the case, but if you don't want to, you're not going to. And if you've made it this long while your field was changing and you were not, you don't want to.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mitre recently furloughed many people - without pay - in lieu of a formal layoff. Management seems to be hoping a bunch of the lost work will return in coming months.

What about hssedi?

Looks like the IDIQ came in a few days ago. $400M, 3 years

https://app.g2xchange.com/fedciv/posts/mitre-attains-400m-dhs-st-security-systems-engineering-and-development-institute-hssedi-idiq

Smaller than expected. Who will do the work? Favored few remaining are not the best and brightest.

That's a 72% cut to ceiling. Yikes.

Given how top heavy they are, five to one ratio, the management will hoover all the overhead and fees and then still charge 10% to each task order, leaving the remaining ~30% to an army of early careers that will be hired into the labs. It will be very difficult to justify the high cost of MITRE when all they bring to the table are recent college grads who don’t know your mission and lack technical depth.

Yikes. With so many recent grade, do they think they are beltway consultants? While I worked there, everyone I worked with were already established folks who could hit the ground running.

I find MITRE to be the opposite. Too many old geezers with PhDs and not enough young innovative (and cheaper) engineers who can actually help government counterparts.

They think they've got great skills, I'll give you that. Unfortunately they aren't willing to do the work to gain domain knowledge. Much easier for an old PhD who knows the domain to learn torch.

The narrower the technical skills, the faster you need to replace the labor. Today's AI experts will be tomorrow's geezers w/ outdated tech skills. And by tomorrow, I mean 3 years or so.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mitre recently furloughed many people - without pay - in lieu of a formal layoff. Management seems to be hoping a bunch of the lost work will return in coming months.

What about hssedi?

Looks like the IDIQ came in a few days ago. $400M, 3 years

https://app.g2xchange.com/fedciv/posts/mitre-attains-400m-dhs-st-security-systems-engineering-and-development-institute-hssedi-idiq

Smaller than expected. Who will do the work? Favored few remaining are not the best and brightest.

That's a 72% cut to ceiling. Yikes.

Given how top heavy they are, five to one ratio, the management will hoover all the overhead and fees and then still charge 10% to each task order, leaving the remaining ~30% to an army of early careers that will be hired into the labs. It will be very difficult to justify the high cost of MITRE when all they bring to the table are recent college grads who don’t know your mission and lack technical depth.

Yikes. With so many recent grade, do they think they are beltway consultants? While I worked there, everyone I worked with were already established folks who could hit the ground running.

I find MITRE to be the opposite. Too many old geezers with PhDs and not enough young innovative (and cheaper) engineers who can actually help government counterparts.

They think they've got great skills, I'll give you that. Unfortunately they aren't willing to do the work to gain domain knowledge. Much easier for an old PhD who knows the domain to learn torch.