Caltrans reviews

Antiquated policies and procedures for just about everything. Performance expectations are either too vague or too low, or both. Each division is isolated in its own silo, making it difficult to collaborate across divisions on new ideas that would benefit the whole department. (This also results in many duplications of efforts, simply because each division is not talking to each other.) Culture has a strong resistance to creative thinking from its employees, at all levels. Poor communication from management on expectations, program status, and funding levels. Old, depressing office building that is falling apart. Technology is always at least 5 years out of date (we just upgraded from Lotus Notes to MS Outlook 2007, for example) and most employees are surprisingly not tech-savvy enough to adapt to the rapid changes happening in our field and in other state DOTs. (It's worth noting that all of these observations are at the main headquarters office in Sacramento. I have heard from other employees that it's not quite as bad in the district offices.)

There's a lot of office politics, confusion, finger-pointing, and discrimination at Caltrans. When something goes wrong, they look for someone to blame instead of fixing the problem. They don't reward harder working employees, nor do they terminate lazy and irresponsible employees. Rather, they just shuffle people around and make them someone else's problem.