Terrible organizational culture. To start, the organization is very untrusting of its employees. If you're used to being treated like a professional/an adult, working for the MTA may be a difficult adjustment. This is the first time in my 20-year career that I've been required to punch a timeclock since working hourly jobs back in high school and college. I made the mistake once of clocking in 3 minutes late because I stopped to talk to my manager on my way in which resulted in me being docked 15 minutes of vacation time. You will be expected to clock exactly 8 hours (including exactly 1 hour for lunch) to the minute every day. If you go over the daily 8 hours, no credit is given, but if you're under, you'll be docked vacation time. You can't make up the time throughout the week - it must be 8 hours per day. Telling a manager or colleague that I can't talk because I'm not on the clock, or spinning wheels at 4:45PM while watching the time clock run its last 15 minutes out when at a natural stopping place for the day feels very juvenile to me. Almost everything including getting internet access on your company computer requires an approval process. There are more paper "anti-theft" timekeeping logs and such floating around than you can keep track of, yet you'll witness quite a bit of blatant time fraud.
The actual work varies, of course, by department. I have been underwhelmed with the level of work given to me. I was told I would be on the "data science" team which turned out to essentially be Excel pivot tables and some Power BI. Most of the work I've been given has been pushing paper and other admin tasks despite having a bachelor's and master's in business and technology, and almost 20 years in transportation industries. It was also briefly proposed that I would be working the "night shift" (10PM-6AM) which was not discussed during the hiring process and frankly made no business sense (the operational department I support works overnight, but in my professional opinion, there is no reason to be crunching numbers in Excel at 2AM just because our frontline workers are out in the field doing overnight repair work). I was eventually told I'd be working a regular "day shift" which is fortunate because working overnight wouldn't have worked for me and my family. It's still the first time in my career that I've been assigned a "shift" in a professional, office role. At previous employers, I was paid to get my work done to the level of quality expected and that involved both long and short days. At the MTA, it feels like the optics of "getting your 8 hours in" is the only thing that matters. The quote "that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired" from the movie Office Space feels very appropriate.
The last thing I'll mention about the organizational culture that was a big adjustment coming from the private sector is a general undertone of a lack of motivation to do anything beyond the bare minimum. That's not to say that MTA employees aren't hard workers; quite the opposite, the people I work with are tough and work really hard. But unlike the private sector where there's a profit motive, there's really no incentive to do things better or go beyond the bare minimum. Annual raises are cost of living adjustments and are not performance based, and there are no bonuses or profit sharing like you often see in the private sector, so no one's really looking to do things better or do anything beyond the minimum of what's assigned to you. The general attitude among MTA employees is "keep your head down and try to not get fired before you can collect your pension." Again, that's not because MTA employees are just lazy, but there's really no incentive to do anything beyond the minimum of what's assigned to you.
The hiring process is abysmal. It takes several months to years (really) to get through the hiring process, if you get a call back at all. I don't know how the MTA can achieve its goal to attract "top talent" when it takes months-to-years to get in. I was hired by being invited to a career fair where I stood outside on a frigid February day for 4 hours to receive a 10-minute interview and was offered a position from that. A recruiter reviewed my resume and told me that I would be eligible for the "associate" level because of my professional and education background. This turned out to not be true and I was later told that I would be hired under the "assistant" level (and ~$10K less salary) without an explanation (the recruiter's response when I asked about this was a condescending "well, do you want the job or not?").
The candidate experience is terrible. After receiving a preliminary offer and beginning the background check process, you won't hear anything for months and recruiters/HR staff don't respond to emails and phone calls, unless it's for something they need. There were plenty of times I thought I had been ghosted when an email would appear from the recruiter asking for something (usually something that had already been given several times - I think I completed the "anti-nepotism" form 4 or 5 times).
I never received a final offer letter. I was notified on a Friday that my background check was complete and was told that I'd be starting the following Monday. I explained that out of professional courtesy, I would need at least 2 weeks to provide notice to my current employer. That was acceptable and I was told that final paperwork would be sent to me "soon" which turned out to mean 4:30PM on the Friday before my Monday start date. So, I spent the weekend before my start date running around trying to get more documents together because just like every step of the process, there's a giant packet of paperwork to complete.
I was instructed to report to an address in Downtown Brooklyn for final processing. Upon arrival, a security guard sent me to another entrance around the corner. At that location, I took a ticket from a machine in a giant room that looks and operates like the DMV. After waiting an hour, I was called up and told that I was in the wrong place and would need to go back to the other entrance. I returned to the other entrance and was told to go back around the corner because that entrance was only for badged employees. After returning to the "DMV," I was told I would need to call my recruiter, who didn't answer. Finally, I was able to get in touch with my hiring manager who was able to get through to the recruiter. The recruiter instructed me to return to the other address and take the elevator to a certain floor. I explained that I don't have a badge, so I'm not able to access that floor. The recruiter eventually came to get me and proceeded to chastise me for not calling him when I arrived (I double checked later, and this was not in the instructions).
Finally, after several hours filling out more paperwork, I was handed a form that showed my title, salary, etc..., along with position type as "provisional." The fact that my position was "provisional" was never disclosed to me at any point in the process and caused a great deal of stress thinking that I left a permanent, full time position for a temp job. When I asked about this, the recruiter tried to skirt around it by saying that many people are provisional "forever" and NYC's civil service law isn't enforced, which I later learned is not true at all. I learned that I would need to take a civil service exam with the city to become "permanent" or else I could be replaced at any time with someone "permanent." Having been hired based on my qualifications and interview, it was stressful to hear that my MTA career may come to an end if I have a bad test day.
A final, peculiar and almost comical thing: you also have to bring a money order to pay for your HR processing.
