A Butts-in-Seats Company - Anonymous employee NVIDIA Employee Review

This is the most demotivating place I’ve ever worked in my entire 10+ career. This company fails to understand how to make good software. At a really fundamental level, leadership does not understand how they should view software. It’s a hardware company. If you’re not doing hardware here, you’re wasting your career. DO NOT JOIN IF YOU ARE NOT DOING HARDWARE OR DATA CENTERS. Run away if you have a job from an ML team. Honestly it’s incredibly sad. If Nvidia would just let go of a bunch of dinosaurs that still think managing your own Jenkins instance is “hot tech”, and if they culturally would respect the industry and people who have made real systems that made real money, Nvidia would be a juggernaut. But sadly, all software teams here are terrible. At best, they’re mediocre. There’s no truly excellent software teams at Nvidia. And the internal tooling and platforms are an absolute joke. Things simply do not work and do not get fixed. There’s internal tools that were made in 1998 and never updated. And the company is an extreme penny pincher. It spends money so poorly. It routinely is ok with paying 10 people for 6 months to do something inefficiently and expensively but would never pay less money to buy a tool to make it go faster and with less people. Nvidia’s motto is “throw bodies at the problem until everyone is miserable and we fail. Then move on to the next thing because that was just busy work.” The company values people that shut up and are ok with mindless, pointless busy work. It’s more important to show face than to make products. Technical contributions are valued very little. What’s more important is that you are chummy with people and make your leadership feel good about themselves. Do NOT voice your opinion or suggest an idea if it means you will disagree with a leader. They WILL RETALIATE. Ultimately, if you work here, you’ll be bored out of your mind and realize you don’t work on anything worthwhile.