Nvidia

The project schedule is mostly set up around the designers, which makes for fairly reasonable engineering deadlines. The environment offers a very good opportunity for young engineers to pick up the trade.

Much of the company has strong confidence in the CEO.

Poor benefits. The company only matches 401k up to $1500/year. Bonuses are not exercisable (even for cash) and are released slowly across 3-4 years. Only upper management receives stock bonuses; senior engineers and below still receive cash bonuses, which are strangely still released slowly across a 3-4 year span.

Poor career mobility. Be prepared to keep working on the same thing for your entire career. Also, one should note that busy work is not necessarily enlightening. There is constant fire-fighting in engineering due to apparent nearsightedness. Engineers might be stuck babysitting someone else's mistake on a daily basis, and there is an odd reluctance by the owners to fix their own mistakes unless they themselves are directly impacted. The sense of ownership and responsibility is surprisingly lacking from many engineers.

Devastating work/life balance. The company has outsourced a lot of the design and verification jobs to India, China, and Taiwan. It has become usual for people in California to get stuck in late-night meetings running past 10 and 11 p.m. for four or more days a week. This puts a lot of stress on the engineers, and employee retention is not superb because of that. We have lost a good chunk of our team to a rival company. Working 10 hours/day or longer is the norm here.

Young engineers find it motivating that they can relate closely to the end product they are working on. However, it is very depressing how the company fails to get design wins time and time again, after the company shifted its focus to mobile.

Please do something about globalization, unless the management is completely okay with engineers in California working from noon to 10 or 11 p.m.