Pluspunten
There are some great scientific opportunities here and many of the staff members are top notch and enjoyable to work with. The breadth of science going on at ORNL really is remarkable. Just about anyone could find something they enjoy doing there. Good flexibility on working hours and time off. Starting to be more open to hybrid/remote work options. Individual managers push back sometimes, but the top-level leadership has finally accepted this as a possibility. Recent leadership changes are moving in a better direction than the previous regime.
Minpunten
Bureaucracy. It seems you cannot do anything without 15 signatures. Many of the administrative/support staff are terrible at keeping up with this stuff and you have to keep bugging them repeatedly, sometimes going to their supervisors to get them to do their jobs. Even spending money that has been promised and already arrived in an account can take weeks because of "work authorizations." It's the least agile organization you could imagine. Project bureaucracy/management. The good researchers end up getting saddled with so much project management that by mid-career they end up spending 90% of their time on budgets, staffing, proposals, etc. I went to school for years to do technical work, not manage things. If you're not a top performer, you can just get stuck on the crappy projects. It's hard to be good and still remain technical. I was an early career staff member by any reasonable definition and already starting to lose a lot of time to things like this. Technical focus. The focus is very much on the "R" side of "R&D" even though all research staff are considered "R&D" staff members. Thus, you usually don't get to work on the same thing for a long time. This is great for some, not for others. "At ORNL, you can work on anything you want" is a common brag from recruiters, but the common retort is "except the thing you came here to work on." You end up having to switch directions to chase whatever the current research buzzwords rather than continuing to develop a useful technology. Collaboration with other institutions. The intersection of intellectual property, export control, and IT is an absolute black hole. Good luck ever sharing anything with another lab or organization in a way that makes sense and enables robust, agile collaboration. Getting a collaborator virtual access requires the same system as bringing someone on-site. Most things are behind a firewall. Emails to change passwords or update cyber access training are considered "business sensitive" and therefore only go to an ORNL email that will obviously not be checked by an external collaborator. All these little things pile up into a mountain that makes it nearly impossible to collaborate with people that are actually on the exact same multi-lab projects. Professional development. There is effectively none of this. If you want to pursue a new opportunity, learn something that could be useful, write a proposal, etc., you had better have a project you can charge for it. You don't have a project this makes sense for? Well, you'd better just use your own free time (or commit what is certainly close to fraud by charging projects anyways). You'll be told a lot that you can ask for professional development funds for specific things but in practice this rarely works. Postdocs get 20% of their time covered for professional development (or at least used to; I think this has been reduced as well), but full-time staff get 0%. Criminal. If I'm doing it for work, I should be getting paid for it or I just won't do it. COVID. The way they treated top performers who had been loyal to the lab for years over something as stupid as getting a shot, even when those people could easily work effectively from home, was just unconscionable (note: I got the shot, I just can't believe how they treated those who didn't). This showed the lack of concern/loyalty by lab leadership for individuals. I do think that has changed some with new leadership, but it was such an atrocious even that it warrants mentioning still. By far the biggest con (and the root cause of the others): the department of energy. You can feel and see the full weight of the bureaucracy and politics of the federal government trickling down to the national lab. 1) The nonsense DEI crap. As if those of us looking for world-class, specialized individuals are going to discriminate against a qualified candidate because of some stupid think about appearance, background, etc. These hiring practices will destroy ORNL if continued. You will end up with a huge workforce of people that were hired because they checked a box and wanted to "change the culture" rather than actually do good science & engineering; this is already happening through low & mid level leadership selections. 2) Focusing research on whatever the national politics are now even though those are driven by people who are either ignorant or have a personal agenda. Things like bragging about the fastest computer in the world when IT can barely keep development machines working properly (correction: they can't keep them working properly). Bragging about contributions to the still fictitious fusion energy while practically abandoning historic leadership in fission energy. Replacing physics with AI instead of properly marrying the 2.