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Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

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Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#151

Post by TechnicolorByte »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #96
rnikander wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Nvidia's gold mine? They don't make their own chips, right? Doesn't that mean that other companies can quickly catch up, if they are even behind?

They built cuda and embedded it as a foundational technology through university partnerships and generally paying attention to developers. Wrote documentation, talked about their tech a lot, generally made the onboarding broadly work. They then had the good fortune that their competitors tried to leverage open source and cross company collaboration. While misc open source winning is sometimes thing, the industry buil…

Any insight into what those design mistakes are?

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#152

Post by jmye »

somsak2 wrote: post #109
jmye wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till they realize there are high-quality devs in SE Asia, South America and India. That remote job can be done by anyone, anywhere. Literally. Some industries may have regulatory protection, but I don’t think it’ll be long before others start mass-outsourcing the kinds of jobs people thought were safe.

Offshoring is nothing new, it's been happening for at least a decade in earnest, of course far more for manufacturing. Even if you just count since the start of the pandemic, companies have now had 3.5 years to figure this out. Where is the mass-outsourcing?

It’s coming with higher quality candidates. For a long time, off-shore devs were uniformly mediocre and generally made things harder. I think that has been changing over the last decade, and is changing faster with more and more high quality online education.

Thinking that there will be a switch-flip moment (or that, because there hasn’t, there won’t be) is, I think, a limited view.

Average American devs just aren’t enough better, or won’t be soon, to justify the massively higher cost, and I think the push from a lot of devs around remote-first policy has forced employers to figure out timezone/asynch issues.

I will say that I’m really guessing about 3-5 years from now. Happy to see other perspectives!

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#153

Post by jmye »

xtracto wrote: post #70
jmye wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till they realize there are high-quality devs in SE Asia, South America and India. That remote job can be done by anyone, anywhere. Literally. Some industries may have regulatory protection, but I don’t think it’ll be long before others start mass-outsourcing the kinds of jobs people thought were safe.

Some already realized that. For USA companies, the problem with Asia, India, and even East Europe is timezones. I used to work at a US company that had offices here in Mexico and had a GREAT QA team in India (despite the hatred they get here in HN, Indian techies are GOOD! ) . The TZ problem is what ended up fracturing the relationship between the teams . Us/Mexico teams synergy was just great, while Indians were gen…

I think the timezone issue is being mitigated - I’ve found Indian devs (only picking them out because of direct experience) were generally already working odd hours to at least give US overlap, but I think asynch tools will continue to get better and make it less of an issue. Probably doesn’t work in a five person startup where you need a lot of direct/constant communication, but especially in mature companies, I think the timing issues are very solvable (where they haven’t already been addressed).

Agree on the quality - there were some devs we worked with who needed more hand-holding, but a majority were very capable.

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#154

Post by nikau »

tester756 wrote: post #51
sandworm101 wrote: post #31

Enjoy the remote work now. It is a bubble. Any job that can be worked 100% remotely can equally be 100% outsourced to a cheaper labor market. Those who had normal jobs pre-covid, and since are totally remote, ride a wave of higher wages. That wave will crash the day employers realize they can find cheaper talent online. If you work remotely then you have to be competative at an international level. Maybe you really a…

>I would also hazard that any job easily done remotely is also ripe for takeover by AI. If your job requires no in-person contact, it might not require a person full stop. Thats... honestly a bullshit that makes me think that you havent worked in cross-geo projects. Why would in-person contact be needed if almost all stakeholders for my project are across US/EU/China/India? You think remote projects are somehow easie…

> I'd want to remind you that there are countless complex OSS projects that are pushed ahead by remote teams.

... remote teams comprised of top 1% talent because they love their job so much they do it for free in their spare time.

Its not quite the same when you have a bunch of lazy wage slaves that want to do the bare minimum.

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#156

Post by llamajams »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #137
llamajams wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have brought up a dozen or so freshies over the last thre years, with mixed results. My approach has changed since the beginning. Initially I would spend a lot of time; casual chats 1-1 and with teams to establish personal bonds, long sessions going over documents, the domain, active support and coaching over progressively harder tasks. This was not successful at all. Now, I just drop them off a cliff. Within the f…

The biggest learning for me was that the amount of time spent coaching was inversely related to the "success rate". For those who genuinely wish to learn whatever the approach is makes little to no difference, for the others it makes a massive difference. This is an interesting point. It might be due to extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation. Does anyone know a good way to measure people's motivation? I guess there shoul…

Best I found was the giving the first task without a deadline, they claw their way through it and get it done asap or you get a series of excuses for a week, or somewhere between the two.if they ask you when or with what quality it needs to be done,it right off the bat it's good sign.
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