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

fortune.com

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

#91

Post by datavirtue »

ghaff wrote: post #18
wildrhythms wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the tax breaks: >Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly. >The contracts were crafted in a pre-pandemic era, at a time when commutes to the office were a given. Now gover…

Existing tax incentives are probably one of the legit reasons why some companies are concerned about wide-scale WFH though I tend to agree with a sibling comment that it's probably also not a major factor. It's reasonable for cities to be concerned. Empty offices take a lot of supporting businesses with them. And, absent a need to go into an office, a lot of people will (and have) decide that the tradeoffs of urban l…

Force people into the office so small businesses don't close? Sounds like communism.

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

#92

Post by MuffinFlavored »

hipparchus wrote: post #49

Ok, I'll bite the bullet: how do you train interns and/or junior employees in a fully remote environment? I only have two years of experience so I'm still super new, but it's something I'm confronted with this, and I just don't know how to train people in a fully remote environment. It's from little things to catching an intern who doesn't know a couple extremely handy shortcuts with tools that they are still learnin…

> Ok, I'll bite the bullet: how do you train interns and/or junior employees in a fully remote environment?

What about interns/juniors needing training can't be solved "asynchronously" via Slack/Teams/Zoom/email/video call + screenshare?

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

#93

Post by rnikander »

tverbeure wrote: post #86
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?

What does Microsoft make? You download bits over a wire and store them on your personal SSD. They don’t make SSDs so it should be trivial for other companies to quickly catch up. For the sake of argument, let’s reduce Nvidia (my employer but I don’t speak for them) to just a silicon vendor. You’re not only ignoring the work of thousands who design the stuff that goes on that silicon, the billions of $ in R&D, you’re…

Yes, my short post may sound dismissive, but I work in tech and I'm aware that our industry has lots of legitimate creativity and intellectual property. Of course we also have hype, marketing, BS, and herd stampedes. Some aspects of GPU/parallel design are commonly understood and other companies make such chips. So I guess I was just wondering if Nvidia had a secret sauce, are they ahead of others, and if so by what measure? I work more in software, and I'm not in a position now to evaluate their hardware on the merits.

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

#94

Post by gg-tyrael-hgh »

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…

> that turn to LatAm do get an "unfair advantage"

My company has been trying to do this (pay top percentile latam salaries) but it’s just been a larger grind to find decent devs than when we were advertising US salaries. “You get what you pay for” seems to be at play for us.

I imagine remote work can give you some edge but we’re trying to get 2 devs for the price of one and it’s really hard. We’re probably losing money on all the time wasted (you get a ton of applicants at lower price points).

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

#95

Post by fy20 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #92
hipparchus wrote: post #49

Ok, I'll bite the bullet: how do you train interns and/or junior employees in a fully remote environment? I only have two years of experience so I'm still super new, but it's something I'm confronted with this, and I just don't know how to train people in a fully remote environment. It's from little things to catching an intern who doesn't know a couple extremely handy shortcuts with tools that they are still learnin…

> Ok, I'll bite the bullet: how do you train interns and/or junior employees in a fully remote environment? What about interns/juniors needing training can't be solved "asynchronously" via Slack/Teams/Zoom/email/video call + screenshare?

In my first programming job I learnt Vim , simply because I saw other people doing it and thought it looked cool. I feel doing the same remotely would be tricky. Even if I learnt of it, how would I ever quit Vim and switch back to Slack?

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

#96

Post by JonChesterfield »

rnikander wrote: post #63
credit_guy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A company with a good product will thrive no matter the policy A different way to say it is "If you found a gold mine, you can afford to do things others can't". 99% of companies don't sit on gold mines like Nvidia.

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 built all their stuff on cuda instead of opencl or openmp.

Nvidia thus built their gold mine.

I don't think it's impenetrable. There are some design mistakes baked into their system that are going to be difficult to unravel without breaking backwards compatibility.

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

#97

Post by JonChesterfield »

Nvidia's model is roughly people sat in a meeting room with a big screen showing a bunch of people at home or in other meeting rooms. I think some people are office based, some hybrid, some wholly remote. They put up some solid engineering on that basis.

AMD engineering is much the same, in case someone reading this is thinking GPUs+remote sounds great, but they want to work on open source instead of proprietary toolchains.

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

#98

Post by jckahn »

fy20 wrote: post #95
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ok, I'll bite the bullet: how do you train interns and/or junior employees in a fully remote environment? What about interns/juniors needing training can't be solved "asynchronously" via Slack/Teams/Zoom/email/video call + screenshare?

In my first programming job I learnt Vim , simply because I saw other people doing it and thought it looked cool. I feel doing the same remotely would be tricky. Even if I learnt of it, how would I ever quit Vim and switch back to Slack?

I imagine that there would be less of a chance of you learning Vim and sticking with something more common like VSCode. And if VSCode meets your needs, then it doesn’t seem like a problem that needs a solution.

FWIW, I’m saying this as an enthusiastic Vim user. But I’d be able to do what I need to with VSCode just the same.

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

#99

Post by tverbeure »

rnikander wrote: post #93
tverbeure wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Microsoft make? You download bits over a wire and store them on your personal SSD. They don’t make SSDs so it should be trivial for other companies to quickly catch up. For the sake of argument, let’s reduce Nvidia (my employer but I don’t speak for them) to just a silicon vendor. You’re not only ignoring the work of thousands who design the stuff that goes on that silicon, the billions of $ in R&D, you’re…

Yes, my short post may sound dismissive, but I work in tech and I'm aware that our industry has lots of legitimate creativity and intellectual property. Of course we also have hype, marketing, BS, and herd stampedes. Some aspects of GPU/parallel design are commonly understood and other companies make such chips. So I guess I was just wondering if Nvidia had a secret sauce, are they ahead of others, and if so by what…

I think your biggest mistake is ignoring the amount of software that runs on top of the hardware.

There were times in the past where others had a higher number of FLOPS, but it didn’t make a dent in the usage of CUDA.

My standard assumption about anything in tech (and beyond) is that you don’t win on first principles alone (“parallel design is well understood”). It’s the details that make you stand out.

Bill Daly gave a great presentation at Hot Chips a few weeks ago that explains how Nvidia’s AI performance was only in small parts due to process improvement. The rest was doing things smarter: matrix sparsity, different number representations and so forth.

https://youtu.be/rsxCZAE8QNA?si=IZneUQQ1J7Gtu81H

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

#100

Post by d13 »

hipparchus wrote: post #49

Ok, I'll bite the bullet: how do you train interns and/or junior employees in a fully remote environment? I only have two years of experience so I'm still super new, but it's something I'm confronted with this, and I just don't know how to train people in a fully remote environment. It's from little things to catching an intern who doesn't know a couple extremely handy shortcuts with tools that they are still learnin…

Video calls with screen sharing a couple of hours a day. Just as good as face-to-face
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