I’m just gonna call it what it is.
When I was a SWE at Fannie Mae, the amount of bloat was crazy. Like actually insane. Half the work was straight-up BS. I’d get assigned something that was supposed to take two weeks and knock it out in a day. Then the rest of the sprint was just fake blockers, pointless meetings, status updates, and people yapping to make it look like something important was happening.
A lot of folks were basically professional calendar fillers. Sitting in meetings, dragging out stories, throwing around buzzwords, acting like everything was “blocked” or “high priority” when really nobody was doing much.
Fannie Mae does not need 15,000 employees. Let’s be real, a lot of us were payroll phantoms. Just collecting checks, moving tickets around, and playing corporate make-believe while a small group of people actually carried the work.
The amount of corporate theater in that place was wild.