Avoid at all costs - Contracts Specialist National Security Technology Accelerator Employee Review

The people are the best part of working here. Everyone is supportive and fun to be around. The work also feels meaningful, and there’s a lot of variety in the roles and projects. I have gotten to work on some really big projects and get to grow my skills. Overall, leadership is transparent. I feel like we have a good sense of what’s going on and why decisions are being made.

At times, you have to push pretty hard to get things done. This is the first time we are doing some of these projects, so there isn’t always a roadmap; you need to be comfortable with ambiguity and figuring things out as you go.

The highlight of the years I spent at NSTXL was the people; I worked with some talented individuals and built strong professional relationships. You’ll also get a crash course in government contracting and plenty of opportunities for travel. If you can handle the dry nature of the industry, the technical knowledge you gain is good, but the positive experience ends there.

The revolving door of employee turnover at NSTXL was constant. Someone in our small department was either getting the boot (sometimes without warning) or jumping ship every month. Between the workload and the fear of losing your job, it was impossible to feel settled in. HR and management dug for dirt on each other all the time in weird ways. Lots of drama there. Quarterly company-wide updates usually consisted of the CEO calling in from his cell phone to recap his networking wins in DC. Felt irrelevant to the actual work we did. Career growth is a myth unless you’re great at playing politics, mainly because leadership would rather hire than promote the talent they have. You'll see what I mean after a brief scroll through their LinkedIn new hires and how many job openings they post for such a small org. There was an irony in working in marketing for a company that couldn’t sell itself to its own employees.