Nvidia

• Name and prestige, perhaps.

I am not sure where all these positive reviews about the healthy work-life balance come from, but it was one of the worst places and onboarding experiences I've had in the industry.

It's actually quite embarrassing for a company that has been around for a really long time, with an astronomically high market cap, and in the middle of Silicon Valley, to have a really bad engineering culture.

There seems to be no value for the whole organization in building a good engineering ecosystem, especially on the software side. There are a lot of upper managers who have been around for a while and are pretty conservative in work culture, imposing servitude on engineers instead of growing them.

As for work-life balance, more than half of my team members have been working past 7 PM every day, and the directory keeps spamming the chat almost every day at 11 PM at night.

The stand-up process is a mess where there are too many people in the meeting, and no one has any idea about the scope of projects. The PM is clueless and seemed to be assigned the role to chase artificially imposed deadlines.

On the compensation side, there is a one-year cliff. So, if you are coming from a lot of FAANG companies, it's pretty much a year of a half-salary pay cut.

If you have been lucky enough to enjoy the wealth and investment growth these past few years, please pay it forward by growing your direct reports' careers instead of running around in circles pleasing upper management.

Take risks to put trust in bottom-up incentives instead of pleasing upper management all the time. You should have enough savings to worry about unemployment.