Nvidia

Very strong, charismatic, and trusted CEO leadership.

The mid-level engineering managers are either still active or used to be talented technical contributors, so they are usually trustworthy in terms of making good decisions.

For such a large company now, things still seem to move pretty quickly. There is heavy emphasis on execution here, so people are conscious about minimizing the overhead.

Again, the emphasis on execution allows the company to invest quite a lot into its internal workflow and methodology.

Very open environment encourages managers and new employees alike to engage in technical discussions.

Competitive compensation. The company seems to be focusing more towards family-friendly employee benefits, which seems to be growing in popularity.

The importance of the work is obvious to most people, without the execs having to hammer such notions obnoxiously.

The department directors seem to be throwing around catchy/buzzworthy phrases from Harvard Business Reviews without providing mid-level managers sufficient guidance on how to address them. I felt that this lack of guidance turns such business school memes into sources of management anxiety, which eventually trickle down as stress to engineers.

Some individual contributors agree that the managers are too busy and a bit "out of touch" with the happenings in the latest projects. The management career path does not seem very appealing, since the individual contributors constantly witness their managers having to deal with weird crap all the time.

Heavy emphasis on execution often pushes many engineers into shortsightedness. You either get criticized here for not delivering on time or for being "too shortsighted."

Weird product/marketing naming schemes aren't always understood by the engineers. They are typically considerate to send someone from marketing to explain. That is very nice, but it's still not clear whether such minutia is understood by our customers.

The work culture is a bit chaotic and challenges people to adapt to new environments. Those who insist on sticking to their work process from their previous job don't fare very well.

I understand why our directors would emphasize few catchy phrases to emphasize the pertinent organizational issues at hand, but please provide the mid-level managers some guidance or examples on how to successfully cope with or address them.

I have witnessed some examples where some business school terminology obviously turned into sources of anxiety in small teams.