Pros
Benefits are extremely generous - excellent 401k matching, lifestyle spending account that can be used for almost anything, many extra days off. Salaries are very competitive for the industry. The people who complain most have delusions of working for top-tier tech companies. Easy to impress people if you're competent. An excellent place to cruise until retirement. Most of the time work life balance is very good.
Cons
Everything at FNMA is about appearances with no concern for function: 1. Managers prioritize sexy projects with questionable value rather than making sure their core products don't fall apart. 2. Cybersecurity is mostly theater and requires insane workarounds with chains of virtual machines that often break and are extremely slow when they do work. 3. Upper management's solution to everything is to create additional bureaucracy that covers things that were already covered. 4. Documentation usually exists, but it is designed by and for technically incompetent audiences. It's also stored on random confluence pages that aren't kept to date.