Nvidia

A very open company. It's easy to move around and learn new things. There's also a collection of pretty decent learning materials. When combined with very few access barriers, both for business and SW/HW engineering, these materials help you see what's going on across the company and how your work fits in with the whole.

Work/life balance is also pretty good. You do have to work a ton sometimes, but it doesn't happen often. It's not grunt work, so I really don't mind. A challenge every so often is nice to have. My team was pretty casual, so you could come in anytime you wanted as long as you didn't miss any meetings. This meant you could easily stay a bit late one day, finish up a train of thought, and not be exhausted the next.

Lots of really chill people here. A pretty social atmosphere, easy to meet people outside your group/team.

Lots of very big legacy code; it's easy to get trapped or lost between spec, hardware, and compatibility requirements sometimes. It takes time to get used to, in my opinion, because it's not how we usually think of software.

Fragmented toolchains and workflows, and bad documentation can be pretty flaky at times, which is extremely frustrating. But that's pretty common in big orgs. I don't think Nvidia is particularly average in that respect.

Food is terrible most of the time, and the cafe has long lineups. There are also no gym, pool, or workout areas.

Better documentation, more consistent tools, and a more centralized/blessed workflow would be nice.

A pool or gym would also be much appreciated; a lot of people here are out of shape.

I can't imagine the caf being that big of an expense, so free food/drinks would be really nice, if only to avoid those stupid lineups.