Somehow the upper management come off as spastic, unpredictable and yet slow to adapt. A confusing and frustrating combination of traits.
Weak people stay around way too long and just get shuffled from group to group until they find a place where they can go unnoticed. Its almost unheard of for people to get fired. Eventually what happens is you get entire teams made up of rejects, often times still in charge of critical components.
The unofficial policy of having a cycling/random hiring freezes results in not being able to hire good people when they are available and hiring whoever walks in the door first when the freeze is lifted. The quality of the average engineer has declines sharply as a result during the time I was there.
The accounting rules imposed on various groups results in this bizarre tendency for managers to blow their entire budget at the end of each quarter because "if they don't use it they lose it next quarter". And then on the flip side insanely harsh budget limits get imposed completely without warning when the budget gets cut when its not used.
And Jensen himself is famous within the company for getting extremely upset and yelling at other managers when goals are not met or things don't go exactly how he wants or simply because he doesn't like them that day. This usually happens in large group settings so as to impose maximum embarrassment. Problem is its caused a culture of yes men around him where no one will tell him things are failing until its too late or they blindly direct their engineers to implement whatever random thought that comes out of Jensen's head without questioning or that no one wants to pick up potentially risky projects for fear of ridicule so they just get dropped.
And lastly, the GeForce cash cow has allowed nvidia to put its head in the sand when everyone in the know knows that that business is not long for this earth as personal computing devices get smaller and more integrated. Tegra was to save us from that fate but with that business burning to the ground everyone seems entirely too happy to pretend like the temporary Maxwell win vs AMD is going to last forever. And yes, as AMD slowly dies a painful death nvidia will appear to grow, but once that fire is put out once and for all, GeForce will hit a ceiling and optimistically will decline slowly, but realistically it will probably have a few catastrophic cliffs as new generations of integrated parts take out more and more of the dedicated GPU business until they are no longer a feasible product category entirely. With Tegra dead that leaves only Tesla and Quadro, but those are products that rely entirely on GeForce's high volume to make the businesses make any sense at all. That would turn nvidia into yet another HPC only company and will see the same fate as Cray, Sparc, SGI and so forth.
Beyond that when I finally decided to move on I was blown away by the offers I got elsewhere. I never felt nvidia was short changing me, but the benefits and compensation were simply not competitive. But the real reason I left was I was just frustrated by the bureaucracy and the fact that management was unwilling to admit its mistakes and learn from them.
