Lots of tradesmen will go "up north" into the oil fields for some hard hard labour but with incredible pay.<p>Most do it once or twice in their life for a couple years and come back to normal relaxed day job (although some are absolute champions and will tough it out long term).<p>I've always figured a job like this at Nvidia would be the equivalent of "I'm going to go up north for a while and come back".
> <i>A former marketing employee at Nvidia told Bloomberg News that she would often attend up to 10 meetings per day — each of them involving more than 30 people.</i><p>> <i>The meetings would be characterized by shouting and fighting, but employees put up with it because of the “golden handcuffs,” according to the ex-staffer.</i><p>Hopefully, the shouting and fighting was at least motivated by drive for the company to succeed.<p>There are dysfunctional places where people don't care.<p>There are dysfunctional places where people battle for <i>individual</i> advancement.<p>There are dysfunctional places where see their job as only doing what they're told, and, culturally, anything else (e.g., questioning, taking initiative) as improper.<p>But if you have a place where everyone is focused on the company succeeding, and the 'only' apparent barrier is that they're not collaborating very well (e.g., not communicating or managing information well, or a brawler is steamrolling over better ideas), that might be a relatively easy dysfunction to improve. You could start by observing a single concrete meeting that's unproductive and/or fighting, figure out the effects and why, and go from there.
> A former marketing employee at Nvidia told Bloomberg News that she would often attend up to 10 meetings per day — each of them involving more than 30 people.<p>> The meetings would be characterized by shouting and fighting, but employees put up with it because of the “golden handcuffs,” according to the ex-staffer.<p>I feel like the more important question is not the hours worked but whether these meetings useful and constructive? If not, maybe these employees could provide more value to the company <i>and</i> have a better work/life balance? My understanding is that generally places (including not just companies, but countries) where the expected hours are really long, much of that time spent is not productive.
"A former marketing employee at Nvidia told Bloomberg News that she would often attend up to 10 meetings per day — each of them involving more than 30 people."<p>Ok, so it is not real work. Of course you can attend fake meetings for 16h per day, but you cannot focus on actual development for that long.<p>(Unless you work on a solo project that really interests you or have significant code ownership within the company.)
NVidia has had an incredibly rise in stock price. That means for anyone who joined 1.5+ years ago, they are sitting on a life-changing but unrealized gain. That means two things:<p>1. They're afraid of getting fired before they can cash in;<p>2. The company knows this so can get more "free" work out of those employees without any really direct threat. All it takes is minor tweaks to how performance reviews work and having a quota for subpar ratings; and<p>3. In 2 years when those gains are all paid out, a ton of people will leave and those that stay will have absolutely no fear and no motivation to do extra unpaid work because they're independently wealthy.<p>This pattern has played out in many tech companies. Some companies (eg Zynga) went so far as to go to employees and tell them "I'm going to fire you if you don't agree to reduce your stock compensation" [1]. In addition to being scummy, it's kinda funny considering where Zynga has ended up.<p>[1]: <a href="https://archive.is/5Py2R" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/5Py2R</a>
The way (most) management thinks is everything is fine because attrition is low. Nevermind that your probably still losing your best people, your culture sucks, your people aren't actually productive, and the second the company hits a rough patch and their grants are underwater- everyone will leave.
Almost like people are willing to work really hard off they face a stake in the success of something. I’ve heard too many dumb owners/execs lament that salaried workers with no stock or other skin the have don’t work hard enough. Follow the incentives, dummy.
So glad to see that the comments so far seems to factor in the credibility level of nypost's assertions.<p>Did a quick google and found examples such as this:
<a href="https://www.comparably.com/companies/nvidia/work-life-balance" rel="nofollow">https://www.comparably.com/companies/nvidia/work-life-balanc...</a><p>Doesn't look that bad from an "Asian work culture" perspective.<p>Is Nvidia more functionally organized or BU organized. From your experience, are functionally organized highly performing companies' meetings generally more passionate, while BU organized highly performing companies' meetings generally more political?