Ignoring the Stock Price, It's Very Much a Mixed Bag at NVIDIA
Pros
The company is growing fast and it's an exciting time to be at NVIDIA. The stock is on fire and everyone is thrilled about this. This is a great place to be if you are an intern, engineer, etc as NVIDIA is doing cutting-edge work that supports AI and Deep Learning industries. Some ability to work from home but it depends on your manager. Being able to do this infers a trust relationship between manager and report - this is on the wane. No vacation time here at NVIDIA. Instead, you can take what you need given your work load at the moment. Some folks put regular vacations on their calendar (a week every 3 or 4 months) just to make sure they're using their time off. Some folks abuse the heck out of this system. Many people will tend to check in while on vacation, never really disconnecting from work.
Cons
It is nearly impossible to grow your career here. Little opportunity or support for transferring into other departments or roles. Newer senior management are awash in politics and are more interested in building empires than in supporting their reports. No yearly cash bonus. Instead you get RSUs that vest over 4 years. If you contribute to your ESPP plan, they use that in factoring how much RSUs you get at focal review time. Not quite fair as ESPP is voluntary. and can change mid-period. Medical benefits are finally starting to compete with the rest of the valley but still lag on 401K contribution matching, cost of medical care for dependants, etc. Educational benefits at Stanford are primarily for CS, EE, EEE, AI majors. There is nothing for management or marketing professionals under this program. There is a separate program that covers just over $5000/year for other education, but this won't cover an MBA. It might cover one or 1.5 classes a year at Stanford. I haven't heard of anyone getting their MBA covered through NVIDIA like at other companies I've worked for. Lunches are supposed to be subsidized, but it's less costly to go out to eat at a restaurant. No snacks provided. Because there is no official vacation time at NVIDIA, if you leave or are laid off and haven't used much vacation time, you've essentially lost it. Meager to absent travel budgets. The management encourages those on global teams to just do video conferences to save money. CFO is constantly cutting costs and does a great job at this but sometimes we spend so much time on how to cut costs, or justifying expenses that we waste money in the lengthy discussion process.
