Nvidia

Lots of freedom, easy to communicate to anyone within the company, and involved in some of the hottest markets in tech.

Somehow, upper management comes 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. It's 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 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 declined sharply as a result during the time I was there.

The accounting rules imposed on various groups result 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 it's 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. The problem is, it has caused a culture of yes-men around him where no one will tell him things are failing until it's 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 versus 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 shortchanging 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.

Fire the people that suck, reward the people that are awesome, stabilize budgets so middle managers can actually plan, and stop focusing on next quarter and start focusing on next year, or the next five years (and not just the lip service that is done now).

Expect the desktop PC to die. Extrapolate what will happen to other markets from there, and take some of the cash that we have in the bank now and take some risks now while we can afford it!