Defense Digital Service Reviews

I can't reiterate the previous reviews enough. Leadership is absolutely as described, near useless and very incompetent. If you like working in an environment where you might see arbitrary and capricious firings, movement of responsibility, or restriction from access to information based on a shallow sighted assessment of performance or a political disagreement; this is the place for you. There are barely any actual motivations behind projects, and the subtle ones that exist, they usually are for the wrong reasons. DDS is supposed to help solve these problems in the department, not create more of them! This will likely not be the last review like this, we mean it when we say to stay away. Leadership is exceptionally toxic and this is not the environment anyone should work in, let alone what should be a team of elite engineers and bureaucracy hackers.

Said talent is enticed to join the team, manipulated, used for all possible PR benefit, marginalized, and cast aside (in that order) on a routine basis. Agree 100% with the reviewer on this site who mentioned leadership not listening to experts. Both the current director and deputy director are utterly out of their depth and don’t seem to have ever been in charge of any size team in the past. They both possess little-to-no technical ability and frequently change their mind about the simplest decisions. Constant chasing of distracting ideas brought up in random meetings. No vision for the organization. And absolutely zero trust in or empowerment of members of the team. What used to be a flat team (albeit not always very organized) under previous leadership had become the same inefficient, bureaucratic organization found everywhere else in the department—only worse, it’s pretending not to be. Projects are randomly picked without using a solid vision for what we’re trying to accomplish as an organization or any realistic transition plan. All good projects are currently dead. The remaining ones Are trumpeted to any senior leader who will listen seemingly in an attempt to get them to put our self-graded assignment on their fridge at home. Do not come to DDS until there is a new director and deputy director. And if the current regime picks the incoming leadership team, still don’t come. Zero stars if I could, stay away. Or if you want to screw off all day and have no work to show for years of your life while being gaslighted or condescended to the entire time, this is the place for you. Some of the (dead weight) team members seem to love it.