Pros

* cutting-edge company with great technology
* great team and smart ppl around
* flexible time management
* fast response and highly efficient tradition
* nice compensation

Cons

* compensation is reasonable but not good enough, e.g. no 401K match.
* crappy cafe :(

Advice to Senior Management

Better compensation depending on performance

Pros

The name - sounds cool to work here - gaming/video/compute - but that's about it

Cons

culture - Nvidia does have a pretty strong external image, however, when it comes to internal corporate culture, it's simply lacking. They don't spend any effort to develop a healthy culture and there's little sense of belonging or pride of the company running within. In the engineering department, everyone is just concerned about getting their job done (which is never) and leave - so there's little people interaction besides talking about work. The culture is so broken, that ppl overly email one another and cc everyone (just to save their own ), when sometimes what it takes is just a phone call or walk up to the person to resolve the issue. People just don't feel belong, except the executive management who still foolishly thinks they're building a great company that ppl are proud to work for.

nature of work - work is so broken down, that one person just do a little bit of the entire project and you tend to do the same thing over and over again - because management does care little if you are happy to be working on what you're working on - they just want to get the job done and whoever is assigned to a task without a thoughtful consideration or taking into employee's wish into account.

career track - middle management care less about your career track - first, there's little advancement, and they tried to nickle and dime you by delaying your promotion as long as they can. The company treats each employee as a "worker", who "completes a task and move onto the next assigned task". So there's little thoughts/process in place as to how one can advance. There's little training provided, and there's no encouragement from the middle management to go for any kind of eternal training - after all, they just care that you finished what you've been assigned.

benefits - ever since the executive management mis-directed the company with poor product planning (way before the financial crisis of 2008 kicked in), they blamed everything on the economy, and used it as an excuse to cut every conceivable benefits possible: no more subsidized lunch, no more PTO, no more service award, no more tuition reimbursement, meagre RSU grant, salary cut - everything done to save them face (cut cost to help improve bottom line) and demoralize everyone while not fixing the real issue. What's more ridiculous is hearing our CEO repeatedly boasted his $1/yr salary as a way to justify all these cuts (a.k.a., "i'm going thru the same pain as u") when he still has millions in stock options - stop those nonsense please.

Advice to Senior Management

get rid of the middle management who does nothing but to save their job and screw up this company. get out of your bubble in which you think everyone is enthusiastic about the company. Stop wasting so much time on improving your prestige and company's image (with all those silly community work) when you can't ever keep your house in order.

Listen to your rank-and-file employee (bypass those useless middle management) Provide a channel to receive feedback.

Pros

Leading edge technology.
Lots of very smart engineers, no office politics to speak of.
Good salary compensation. Gave out good stock options in the past.
Flexible work hours, feel free to work as much as you can.

Cons

nVidia excels at hiring the best and brightest engineers, put them in mind-numbing, dull,
repetitive jobs.

You'll become obsolete in the job market after a few years at nvidia because you get too
 used to all the internal tools that you forget how to use industry standard tools.

Some bright engineers get promoted to become not so good managers, and ultimately
lousy middle management.

Very little interaction with co-workers outside of work, everyone works long hours, then
hurries home, just to come back eight hours later to repeat the cycle.

Coworkers who quit, get laid off, or fired, simply disappear with as little fanfare as with the new
employees who come in to take their places.

Advice to Senior Management

You motivate employees either by 1) pour money on them, or 2) treat them well. nVidia used to
do 1), but is now doing neither. Will what happens be difficult to predict?

Pros

NVIDIA has for a long time been synonymous with high-performance, cutting-edge graphics. It's fun to have a job at such a well-known company,

Cons

NVIDIA is terrible about career development. The only way to advance at the rate at which you should is to leave NVIDIA within 1-3 years. They're unapologetic about this policy and offer almost nothing in the way of performance bonuses or benefits. In fact, unless you press your manager, NVIDIA doesn't by default even tell you what level you were hired at. They also won't let you have a copy of the HR guidelines for the requirements and expectations of each employment level. These are not the policies of a company that has employee career development as any kind of priority.

The net result of this behavior is that NVIDIA fosters a culture of mediocrity by denying their best engineers raises, promotions, and bonuses/incentives. They seem to be better about advancement on the management track than they are on the engineering tack. But for engineers interested in a career, this is the wrong company. However, if you're okay with a 1-3 year position and then moving on to another employer, you might be willing to forgo career growth in exchange for the chance to work at NVIDIA.

Advice to Senior Management

My advice to management would be to consider the long-term implications of their current policies. While it may look good on paper to nickel and dime your employees, in the long run this strategy destroys companies because they're utterly incapable of attracting and retaining the top talent. Since NVIDIA doesn't actually produce anything (all manufacturing is done elsewhere), the company is only as strong as the ideas it can create. Great ideas do not come from mediocre engineers.

Pros

1) Cutting Edge technology, core products probably the best in business.
2) Very smart peers - probably one of the best in the silicon valley.
3) Future technologies are positioned well to continue leading in the market.

Cons

1) With new professional time off system, vacation feels like a request with your manager rather than something part of the benefits package. This makes some people hesitant to take days off - I definitely didn't take 3 weeks off since last year.
2) Before you realize it, there is just a lot of work on the plate.
3) Aggressive coworkers who work 24 hours a day and are very smart makes it difficult to be contributing at equal level.
4) Benefits have gone down - no more free lunch - meagre / no stock - salary raises promised some random time in the future, but not concrete.
5) best people in the industry but products still sometime broken probably due to Long working hours and aggressive schedules resulting in shortcuts.

Advice to Senior Management

Treat the employees better and make it accepted culture to work a normal number of hours. This would make people happier over the very long term and probably result in higher quality products.

Pros

You get to always work with leading edge, industry changing technologies and initiatives. It has a very diverse group of engineers you get a chance to work on many different projects. It has a very open working atmosphere, and most people respect each other and very little politics goes on.

Cons

Often require long hours. Although as the company grew much bigger over the past 6,7 years, it seems the quality of people are no longer as top notch as before as is commonly the case for most companies as they grow bigger. Of course it all depends on which group you work in. Over the years, I have observed my group lay people off who have worked there for years without even sending out an email or have a goodbye party, and you don't find out the person is no longer there until an email bounced back. I found this a bit disconcerting.

Advice to Senior Management

Develop more internal engineers with business senses.

Pros

Highly technical work
Great benefits package and working conditions
Excellent peer group with no politicization

Cons

Little career advancement
Less options in terms of variety of work
Compensation low in proportion to the work expected

Advice to Senior Management

Be more open to negotiate compensation with juniors
Try to get more exciting products/projects and tasks for juniors

Pros

-Great Name to put on your resume. Any job would hire you after having to work there for some time
-Potential to be one of the top tier tech companies in the world
-Great teammates who are always there to teach and educate others
-Ability to learn and keep up to date with cutting edge technology
-Working with the best and brightest except management.

Cons

-No work/life balance. All work gets piled up. The more you do, the more you are rewarded with extra work with no extra compensation.
-Management are cold and doesn't recognized the hard we put in so long as it gets done
-Expectations are unrealistic from Management as we are expected to do the job of other roles.
-Confused about our position as they are not structured and it is unorganized
-Zero encouragement from mid or direct management and we are always shot down making it look we are always the problem

Advice to Senior Management

Overall it is a great company and it seems to be going into the right direction however the only roadblock we encounter is having the mid-management in the way, always delegating extra unnecessary work or comments to us when we're already so busy with our own work. It seems that they are not there to help us at all except to slow us down on our pace by pushing us to push others in other departments when it is not even our role doing so. This should be their job. Often we are always the problem to them when situations arises on their end and they seem to show that they have power. Productivity would be much better by eliminating the mid-management positions or replacing them with experienced ones coming from other top tier companies.

Pros

Very smart and innovative engineers, good equipment, no haggling by management over things like second PCs or additional monitors. Decent canteen.

Cons

Sometimes the work can get a little boring. Quite repetitive at times, and unless you are very senior, there is little or no room for innovation.

Advice to Senior Management

Seem to be doing a solid job on balance. Direction of the company is good, and they make an effort to treat employees well.

Pros

Most other reviews have hit the nail on the head in my opinion. The technology here is bleeding edge and that makes it "cool" to work here for a bit. There is also absolutely zero office politics and emphasis is purely on getting the job done.

Cons

Unfortunately, the positives of NVIDIA end there. The work atmosphere is good, but not great. People are very antisocial and come for the sole purpose of getting their job done to get higher performance numbers. A new-comer has extreme trouble getting adjusted to the company. Work starts to pile up slowly. You work standard 40 hour weeks, then you are asked to do something "extra" just for this week. This extra time then becomes your standard time. Before people know it, their standard time is about 70 hours per week and you work on Sundays. Work life balance is not existent.

Advice to Senior Management

Do something about work hours expected. Bring all the old benefits back which were removed during the recession period.