Great Graphics Innovation, Daily Life Needs Improvement
Pros
NVIDIA is truly leading in the graphics space and it's Tesla, Tegra and pc-GPU efforts continue to set the high bar. Management is very high on the company's innovations and its technical expertise. NVIDIA allows Engineers to work from diverse, international locations. Life balance is pretty good, because NVIDIA is very philanthropic and encourages it's employees to give back to their communities. The company hosts several fundraiser and community outreach projects each year and most international locations. You can bring your dog to work! The main campus cafe is excellent, and the secondary cafe is pretty good. However, NVIDIA does not provide a food subsidy. Only sodas, coffee, tea and water are free in the cafes, and vending machines are available on most floors in the main buildings. NVIDIA admittedly pays a a little below the average industry rate, but they supplement it with twice-per-year bonus periods where employees have a chance to earn RSUs. Onsite services are pretty good: cafes, dentistry, massage, car maintenance, dry cleaning, and more. The cultural make-up is primarily Asian, with most folks being from India and China, then Caucasian. Women are not well represented in the Engineering ranks. There is a very active intern program.
Cons
NVIDIA allows Engineers to work from diverse, international locations. However, that makes if difficult to collaborate on projects. The company lacks a clear workflow for information distribution with data spread between various teams, their poorly maintained wiki pages, and various Perforce documents, not easily accessed. When working on devices, there is no clear project leader to manage the evolution of the life cycle, outside of major milestone goals in software. It is easy to lose track of small, but critical changes to behaviors, or ODM data settings, for example. Devices across teams often have various components onboard creating inconsistent testing results, with no primary documentation to refer to to confirm correct components. Sr management is in Santa Clara, but some middle management and the bulk of QA is in India. The communication between the two locations is on-going, but India is doing all the tools and automation development. Their primary focus is their needs, and they try to shoehorn other teams into the tools they have developed, instead of being responsive to the actual needs. They have determined the project reporting structure and are inflexible to provide something more modern. QA is being driven towards 100% automation. Sr Management doesn't seem to understand that this is impossible, and continues to make unrealistic demands of automation teams. This is happening in India and US teams have limited insight into the effort. NVIDIA has a very low tolerance for QA spending money on its QA efforts. Resources are difficult to acquire. The company-wide policy is borrow, rather than buy. If you don't have to borrow, look for an alternate solution first. Members of my team often start the day looking for test items that have been "borrowed" by Engineers. The computer infrastructure is Windows-based, but many folks use Macs and Linux workstations. Sometimes these other OSes are required, but they are poorly supported by IT. It can be miserable when problems arise.