Pros

Good job location. Some smart people that you can really learn from. A great place to start if you are in the mortgages industry.

Cons

Not sure when the downward spiral will end. Maybe until the government goes out and stops the meddling of affairs.

Advice to Senior Management

Strike the balance between satisfying the government and really making money for the company. Find a way to retain all the talents.

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.

Pros

Great benefits (health, new home buyers, etc.)
Compensation is competitive
Lax company culture / dress code
Existence of New Hire "class" and comradery (lots of events social and otherwise done together)
Many young professionals between the interns and new college hires
New College Hire IT Rotation - samlpe different IT work before landing somehwere
Gym in most buildings (also volleyball/basketball intramurals and leagues)
Very diverse workplace (culturally, agewise, background, etc.)

Cons

Big company, moves slow
Future uncertain
Generally low moral (among interns and college hires I spoke to)
I felt like I would be doing the SAME work years down the road (hard to move around)

Advice to Senior Management

Be more transparent about thewhat you will actually be doing when you're hired.

Pros

Extremely talent staff (many former mgmt consulting and Wall Street), challenging problems, and pleasant environment

Cons

Politically charged environment, but new management may break these habits

Advice to Senior Management

Nothing they don't already know...

Pros

I have a great job at Freddie Mac. I love the actual tasks that I do and I have huge amount of autonomy and freedom in how I do my work.

Cons

Our future is really uncertain. There isn't a high amount of job security. Variability in the leadership of individual managers is pretty high. If you interview there, you may want to ask your future manager about development opportunities or how they like to interact with their direct reports. While some managers are pretty good, I hear a lot of bad things about some of them too.

Advice to Senior Management

More transparency.

Pros

- Only have to work 39 hours a week
- Pay is great for an entry-level job, 9% performance bonus, sign-on bonuses cumulating to $7,000
- $12,000 off your first home
- Job stability
- Exposure to senior management
- Not much responsibility and work is easy
- Laid back culture
- Fun people to be around

Cons

- Little room for professional growth
- Management hired outside of the company
- Industry future is uncertain
- When you're in the mortgage industry, it's hard to get out
- DC traffic
- Lazy culture

Advice to Senior Management

Stop wasting so much time in unnecessary meetings and spend some time with your employees. Learn what they are actually doing. Leaders are not just bosses.

Pros

It has a great cafeteria, facilities (doctor on site, gym, ATMs), and general benefits plan.
The work/life balance is fair. Freddie is good about rewarding high performance. If you are rated high during annual review, your bonus with reflect so. It also has a very nice and diverse atmosphere of colleagues.

Cons

Management is terrible. All decisions have to go through the entire food chain of managers so even little decisions take months and months to resolve, if at all.
One of my biggest disappointments about working here so how pigeon-holed you are in a job. The roles are very narrow and very focused but the company doesn't spend or want to waste time training you to learn big picture issues.
The technology is the very worst I've ever seen. A lot of the systems were built in the 80s but the company either halts projects to update them or does not want to spend the money.
It's hard to move to a different section of the company, even internally.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more decisive and be quicker with changes. Adapting is not something Freddie does well. Be more proactive instead of reactive. Waiting for the problems to blow up before fixing them leads to headaches for everyone.

Pros

Overall great organization because the company purpose was known and incorporated in every project. Good inclusion and diversity of staff at all levels, including sexual orientation.

Cons

Too much needed to be done and the focus on the details that make a difference were sometimes over looked. When layoffs occurred, some folks that did not deserve it, were let go. Like most companies, Politics are king, even over logic.

Advice to Senior Management

Perform 360 degree reviews for all employees and act upon those findings. Value the talent that is there and reward accordingly.

Pros

Like most places, Freddie does have some smart and really nice people.
The work-life balance in certain areas isn't actually that bad.
Probably a stable place, especially during the financial crisis.

Cons

Very academic.
Political.
Slow.
Not at all strategic.
Stagnant.
There are no "real" leaders or managers.

Advice to Senior Management

It'll be nice if the management is more pro-active, in terms of reaching out to employees and getting their feedback. Sometimes, it feels like the management lives in stone age and functions as academicians rather than strategists. Management should ensure that "managing people" is a course that is made mandatory for all managers. Finally, management could do a better job at hiring people.

Pros

Excellent benefits. Right balance of pressure.

Cons

Very bureaucratic organizational structure. Company suffers from some pressure in some departments, first because of accounting woes while I was there, and now due to the whole economic crisis.

Advice to Senior Management

Be smarter.