Freddie Mac – “What's the point?”

Pros

Great benefits and 401K
A bunch of divisions that do different things (finance, acctg, IT, investments, fraud, defaults, etc)
Good starting salaries
Perks (internet surfing, TVs, gyms, vending machines, Starbucks, dry cleaning, catered parties)
Jean Friday
Town halls where employees can ask CEOs/CFOs/etc. questions in person.
Six Flags family day (cancelled last year due to all the media hooplah)
The mission: make home possible and affordable for as many families as possible
Community invovlement (especially Habitat for Humanity and Wednesday's Child)

Cons

Too many pointless managers (the happiest analysts are those that report straight to a director, and the happiest directors are those who directly manage their anaylsts; the unhappy people have middle managers to go through)
Very hard to get internal transfers
Management won't tell us about the company's future (I'm sure they know at least something)
Expected to work 60+ hours a week with no overtime. Expected to work weekends every now and then (if I have to be at work during senior management's hours, then give me a senior management type of salary. Otherwise, what's the point?).
Many groups frown on letting employees telecommute or work from home on their laptops. Why do we have them then?
End up doing the same job/tasks for years. Management is poor at helping employees grow professionally.
The accounting controls environment is insane. What's the point of auditing a department, having an internal review, having an internal audit, and having an external audit - each quarter? It takes more time to go over the controls of a task than it does to do the actual task.
Managers call too many pointless meetings just to make themselves seem busy and feel important.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of 30% of the managers. Get rid of 10% of the directors. Make the media rounds and explain what we do so that our friends and family members will stop asking us "What's going on over there at Freddie Mac?" Cut out some of the controls on old tasks and focus on developing new strategies with simple controls around those. Hire more from within the company so employees are better able to move around. Tell managers to stop calling so many meetings each day. They sit in the same aisle as us; they can just walk 5 steps to our cube and say what they have to say. Let us use our laptops at home so we don't have to do a pointless 1 hour commute on non-busy days. Pay overtime or let us leave on time.

FYI - David Moffett is not the CEO anymore. Hasn't been for a year. He quit on us.