Nvidia

NVIDIA walks the walk. They have standards for how people should be treated, and they live up to them. They pay very well and have generous ESPP and 401K matching programs. They also encourage people who are interested in working on something new to move internally – that keeps your team's perspectives fresh.

One story I heard illustrates the heart of the company. I joined in the middle of the worst of the pandemic, when everything was locked down. NVIDIA has a big campus in Santa Clara, and that was likewise shut down. The company that provided the on-site food for employees was obviously not needed, but the CEO, Jensen Huang, decided to keep paying them so that they wouldn't have to lay off their people. The money was already budgeted, so rather than treat it as a windfall for NVIDIA, he made sure that the people from the catering service could still make their mortgage payments and support their families. Now that's a company I could be proud to work for!

Health insurance: Unless you're in California, the coverage options are limited to Cigna, and none of my doctors accepted Cigna.

I only had one bad manager: someone who would promise something and then never follow through. When I mentioned that to someone else in the org, they just said, "Yeah, [name] is like that – can't rely on anything he says." But for some reason, that guy kept his job despite bad behavior. I wished there was some way to initiate a review from above, where people who worked with the problematic person could give anonymous feedback to confirm or refute the problem.