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The way that Jensen Huang runs Nvidia: 40 direct reports, no 1:1s
- tpmx 3y agoNo status reports, instead he "stochastically samples the system" - Doesn't use status updates because he believes they are too refined by the time they get to him. They are not ground truth anymore. - Instead, anyone in the company can email him their "top five things" with whatever is top of mind, and he will read it - Estimates he reads 100 of these everyone morning I like this idea.
- basiccalendar74 3y agoIn practice, each org has a top5 mailing list to which employees send weekly updates. Jensen samples from these mailing lists.
- tpmx 3y agoWho can read the mails sent to each org's top5 mailing list? Can ICs subscribe?
- basiccalendar74 3y agoeveryone in the org can read them. One can also subscribe to other org's mailing lists.
- tpmx 3y agoAwesome. I'm a software guy who for 1.5 years worked for a hardware company with a relatively strict upwards-only information reporting structure. It wasn't even for secrecy, it's just that the people running it didn't understand the concept of collaboration at all. They were a mix of physicists and economists. Really smart but also, as it turned out, very 'square' people. It was a relatively small company, around 100 people. It felt quite soul-crushing after a busy week to have to spend mental efforts writing up a report to someone 1-3 levels up... especially if you had no idea if it was ever read. And then do this every single week. If colleagues could read and learn from this effort it would make a lot more sense. Never again. Went back to the relatively speaking much saner software world after that experience.
- cloudripper 3y agoThank you for the articulation of the issue and your experience dealing with it. Were you aware of the articulated issue (the absence of collaboration) while you were there? Or did it only become clear in retrospect? I imagine in an environment like this it would be easy to get lost in the feeling of being undervalued and disrespected, without being clear of the source/cause of that feeling (unhealthy organizational culture).
- tpmx 3y agoThanks for the interest but no.
- VancouverMan 3y ago> It felt quite soul-crushing after a busy week to have to spend mental efforts writing up a report to someone 1-3 levels up... especially if you had no idea if it was ever read. There are ways to test that. You could just not submit the report, and see if anybody complains. Or prepare the report, but intentionally corrupt the file before submitting it, and see if anybody complains. Or prepare the report, and in it ask if anyone is actually reading it, and ask that they contact you if they are.
- tpmx 3y agoI needed to submit a .pptx file with 1 or more slides that my manager would manually insert into his weekly presentation deck to the exec team. I admit I never had the guts to submit a slide which asked if anyone was reading it. It did cross my mind. (It was a Microsoft-by-default-company, as many small hardware/research-oriented companies often are, I guess. There was also that one week epic fight needed to get approval to run MacOS/Linux in the new "software department".)
- epolanski 3y agoYeah, but it works if someone reads and cares.
- ryandrake 3y ago> - Doesn't use status updates because he believes they are too refined by the time they get to him. They are not ground truth anymore. Facts. I worked in a place where one my primary work outputs was a weekly high-stakes status document, and boy this document was refined, and agonized over, and wordsmithed, and revised, and re-revised, and softened, and distilled, and lenghtened, and shortened, until it was precisely the exact narrative that the VP and SVP needed to hear. By the time it went through the hands of dozens of engineering managers and was submitted, it was far, far divorced from reality. Then, rinse and repeat next week. I don't know if/how leadership had a clue what was really happening.
- aborsy 3y ago- Does not conduct 1:1s - everything happens in a group setting. Wouldn’t in large meetings mostly the loudest and most political be heard? How do you hear everyone in a large meeting? Who takes credit, assumes responsibility, be more or less paid, etc? 1:1 are important, at least to connect to people. Nvidia bet on a good fast growing market early on (AI). Maybe that explains their success. Also, take these stories with a grain of salt, til the sources are clear.
- koromak 3y agoThe meetings he's are are already filled with people comfortable being loud and political. I'm sure the actual technical doers are having plenty of 1:1s
- itiro 3y agoConnection to people is important and grown ups can sort out how and when.
- mcoliver 3y agoYou know where people play politics? 1:1's. Stories get told, facts left out, no dissent, people take credit for things they shouldn't be taking credit for. Group accountability and transparency squashes all that.
- caminante 3y agoFor me, shadow governance is intrinsic to large organizations. It's going to happen. At these "open" nVidia meetings, I'm sure cliques are texting on MSFT Teams or SMS. I'm skeptical that 1:1 here means no 1:1 contact and rather no recurring meetings with reports.
- aborsy 3y agoPeople play politics everywhere possible. 1:1 at least guarantees that you have a chance to present your work. Problems with meetings: people don’t express themselves because they might offend others or create enemies, people follow each other, no defined rules on how the meeting operates, problems with credit, diluted responsibilities, opportunities for shifting the work and credit, as someone said in comments formation of cliques competing, etc. Both are probably needed. You need to mix.
- DiabloD3 3y ago[flagged]
- epolanski 3y agoImagine being seriously convinced Nvidia is falling apart.
- DiabloD3 3y agoImagine being seriously convinced Nvidia is a good example of a successful tech company, and that Jensen is just a quirky startup CEO and should be worshipped like how people worship Steve Jobs (which is also wrong to do, fwiw). Again and again, Nvidia does everything possible to make shareholder value look good, while robbing both shareholders and customers of value.
- epolanski 3y agoThose are opinions not facts. Anyway, I was writing a longer post but I'll summarize it very simply: lack of competition in the GPU market (which is the cause of your overblown points) isn't Nvidia's fault.
- DiabloD3 3y agoHow isn't it Nvidia's fault? Nvidia refuses to compete. They refused to compete for the Sony contract, they refused to compete for the Microsoft contract, they've refused to compete for countless Top500 supercomputer contracts. They didn't just not win the bid, they didn't even bother bidding in some cases. They "competed" for the Switch contract because they had a warehouse of SoCs that were made for an era of gaming phablet that never happened and selling them at cost to Nintendo was the best they could do. You know how they chose to compete? They bought Mellanox, a smaller but extremely competitive company in the high bandwidth interconnect market.... which after the Nvidia acquisition, Nvidia dropped the Mellanox name (maybe the most valuable thing in the entire acquisition!) I'm straight up glad I don't own Nvidia stock. I'd have an ulcer if I did. I'm not saying AMD is magically better here, AMD has all of their corporate and technological warts too... but at least they show up and do the job. Nvidia doesn't even show up.
- sdfghswe 3y agoI'm not saying these are good or bad. But I note that every time a company becomes "hot", people start mindlessly copying its quirks, as if those are the things that make the company. They might be, or they might not. Reminds me of a friend who didn't wear socks because Einstein didn't wear socks. The implication being "he doesn't wear socks and he's smart, so if I don't wear socks I'll be closer to being as smart as Einstein". Ok, we were like 8 years old, but still.
- jabradoodle 3y agoThis drives me crazy. let's adopt the practices of this blog post from an org 100x larger than ours, building a product which is in no way similar to ours... why?
- rnk 3y agoHey, 40 direct reports is accepted best practice! Remember when google did that? My manager was a poser back 15 years ago, he had only 20 direct reports - I'm not making this up.
- b112 3y agoNo one on ones is probably to protect from sexual assault allegations. No time alone == safe.
- 13of40 3y agoWell hold up, I do 1:1s with people at least every two weeks, but I haven't actually breathed the same air as one of them since the beginning of summer. (We both drove to that empty building downtown and had lunch, IIRC.)
- rnk 3y agoHmm, we'll probably see you in the people's court soon.
- 3y ago
- paganel 3y ago1:1s are mostly a fad, people refusing to go with the team and thinking that they're special and that they need personal counselling and growth-ing and all that bs. It's simple, you're either part of the group or you're not, there's no "I" in group. I don't see past great leaders (military and not only) doing 1:1s with the members of their groups.
- epolanski 3y agoAny team and organization does 1:1s in some ways regardless of how formal they are and regardless of those being scheduled on your outlook calendar. Even a chat exchange of ideas or mails qualify as a 1:1.
- ghaff 3y agoI probably never had scheduled 1:1s with my manager prior to my current job (and it's been hit or miss when I was traveling a lot) aside from specific events like maybe performance reviews. But had lots of in-person conversations, many with open doors, some not.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoI suspect that it was routine for "past great leaders" to have 1:1s, which only means to have opportunities to speak face to face in private with direct reports. The modern 'open space' office makes it impossible because it is effectively a panopticon where everyone is in full view and hearing distance of others all the time so effort has to be made to schedule 1:1s and that may seem forced and contrived. When one had to go to their manager's private office to report of discuss something it was easier to exchange in confidence without any specific planning. My personal experience is that 1:1s are very useful not just as an opportunity to raise and discuss concerns but to create rapport and talk shop openly and informally.
- ghaff 3y agoThere's probably truth in that. If I think back, I'd have 1:1 talks with managers all the time in prior lives but I'm not sure I ever had standing 1:1s. Even at my current company, we often theoretically had regular 1:1s but with travel and other schedules they could end up being every month or two.
- nine_zeros 3y agoA lot of modern software management is utter BS with ceremonies and processes, all filled with BS work for optics and politics. The old-school SV management style of actually being a leader is lost these days.
- khazhoux 3y agoYou're wrong. Not a single piece of working software (literally zero) was shipped before Agile was invented 15 years ago.
- nine_zeros 3y ago> You're wrong. Not a single piece of working software (literally zero) was shipped before Agile was invented 15 years ago. You're wrong. Not a single piece of working software (literally zero) was shipped before a combination of Leetcode + agile + performance reviews + feature factory culture + microservices was invented in the last decade.
- greenthrow 3y agoDon't blame systems for ineffective leaders. Those leaders would be ineffective under any system.
- mrcwinn 3y agoI love this. When I was CEO of a roughly 60-person startup, one of the things I told my (then-new) executive team was, I don't do 1:1s and I'm not here to develop you professionally. If you require professional development, I made a mistake placing you on my executive team. It helped establish a culture of execution and high standards. It also fostered a lot of trust and cohesion. Everyone knew they were there because they deserved to be there, and so it made it very easy to make fast, correct decisions without a lot of bullshit. They were a great group and I felt lucky to have them on the journey.
- bjt12345 3y agoI suppose the first question is. What's in it for me? What's on the table here? This to me sounds like a culture of no support for technical staff, no listening, and helicopter management when things go wrong. And no training budget.
- ShamelessC 3y agoPresumably a lot of money and mental health issues.
- latency-guy2 3y ago[flagged]
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoJust because something sounds bad to you doesn’t make your speculation accurate. > and no training budget You’re just speculating. And this GP was referring to his executive reports, not the ICs.
- bloqs 3y agoEveryone regardless of status, position and experience requires professional development. Otherwise you claim omnicience. Finding willing participants to seed a narcissistic pyramid of self congratulation who are willing to forego this, to furnish either their ego or yours (or both) is commendable, however.
- andsoitis 3y ago> Does not conduct 1:1s - everything happens in a group setting I don’t believe that. There’s really no confidential matters he discusses with team members on a 1-on-1 basis?
- pixl97 3y agoDepends what you mean by group, but ya, even 'personal' meetings probably have a member of HR in the room. There is no thing as so confidential that only 2 people need to know it.
- ghaff 3y ago>even 'personal' meetings probably have a member of HR in the room That seems ludicrous at any company I've worked for absent some serious HR-related issue.
- sokoloff 3y agoIn my experience, if HR is in the room for a 1:1:1 personal meeting, things are not going well for at least one person in that meeting.
- bbor 3y ago“Does not schedule 1:1s” likely doesn’t mean “never has 1:1 conversations in his life”. I have no idea what being a ceo of a infinity-dollar company is like, but I imagine he’s on somewhat amicable terms with many of his reports, and many opportunities outside of scheduled meetings to talk with them. Slack, for example - assuming he’s not pulling a Sundar ;)
- stusmall 3y agoI think they are referring to regular, scheduled, private standing meetings between a manager and their subordinate. They are often called "1 on 1s". Of course he talks to folks in private when needed.
- justheretoday 3y agoThe other anomaly is that Jensen talks all the time with ICs doing the work. I was only a couple of months into working at the company before I got to have a face to face discussion with him about a project I was working on. I have seen many mid-level engineers (IC4-IC5) give him deep dives in these group meetings. It can be very stressful being under Jensen's microscope, but it dramatically reduces the "let's show pretty slides to the CEO to show him everything is good" BS. I was previously at a startup 1/100th of this size where the CEO was far less connected to rank and file engineers, so it has been a really nice change.
- icedchai 3y agoI've been on small teams where the direct manager was completely clueless about the day-to-day work of his 3 or 4 reports. These are professional meeting attenders, basically. 10+ years ago this seemed much less common in tech. Management was more technical and CEOs would actually talk to the ICs.
- kalupa 3y agothis might be unique to your experience. I can't say the same about my own a decade ago. it was due to the employer I was with at the time. they valued "attendance" and "billable hours" way more than quality or even meeting deadlines, let alone talking tech execution with a product manager
- Sebguer 3y agoBy and large leadership of engineering companies have been subsumed by finance heads. Boeing is the canonical example, but Intel also (and their attempts to course-correct haven't been super successful).
- squirrel6 3y agoI’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately. Thinking over Chernobyl, Fukushima, and so many business scandals, I think this is the right way to run any organization, public or private. You just can’t have individuals encountering real issues of substance to the business without any voice to raise them to the highest levels of management. Moreover, I don’t know how any executive could expect to try and steer a behemoth of an organization when their only visibility into the business is at such a low resolution owing to the oversimplification baked in through so many reporting layers.
- rib3ye 3y agoPublished by "strategy" consultant with no cited sources. Naa.
- dang 3y agoSome are listed here: https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1701644142739349898 https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1701644142739349898 I haven't watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5xY_kRKHxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5xY_kRKHxE but perhaps someone will be interested enough to.
- tverbeure 3y agohttps://twitter.com/ctnzr/status/1701736726908240311 https://twitter.com/ctnzr/status/1701736726908240311
- matt3210 3y agoThis is a psy-op to get AMD to have this horrible management structure.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago1:1s are a peculiarly American thing (in my experience) - perhaps something to do with the individualistic yet somewhat still old fashioned and hierarchical business culture? 1:1s are problematic because they discourage/displace lateral communication between team members and encourage siloing. Everyone has to guess what 'the boss' said to the others, and to figure out which piece of the puzzle they've been entrusted with - classic oppressive divde and conquer strategy. Of course for people who may not be comfortable in social settings, 1:1s may be the only thing they can grapple with properly.
- JTbane 3y agoI absolutely despise 1-on-1s. It's either me complaining about corporate policies that I have no power to change (looking at you, WFH) or some feature is a complete dumpster fire and I get lectured about it.
- tstrimple 3y agoThat's odd. 1:1s shouldn't be used for normal every day work and project activities. It definitely shouldn't be just a status update to your manager. For me they are a way of checking in on longer career and growth goals that can be neglected when caught up in the "real work". They are also where I check in on promotion readiness and ensuring expectations are aligned. Things which you typically don't want the rest of the team in on. Anything directly project related should be either a team meeting or shared via more open communication channels.
- somewhereoutth 3y agoRight! So every quarter or maybe once a month max then.
- msm_ 3y agoYeah, whatever works for you. When I was at a place that did regular 1:1s, my manager always stressed that they're for me, not for the company, and if I want to change the frequency of time I should just let them know. Not sure about your company culture, but if you're already experienced, I can't imagine your boss would be unhappy if you said "you know, I don't need so much guidance, let's have less 1:1 meetings". Assuming most of the communication happens in regular team meetings, which seems healthy.
- jiggawatts 3y agoWith 40 direct reports, he can pay attention to each one for at most about an hour per week on average. (Even if he works crazy hours, you have to factor in overheads and other tasks.)
- koolba 3y agoOnly having your boss bother you for an hour a week doesn’t seem so bad.
- Havoc 3y agoIf you’re sitting of a money printer then damn near any org structure will work. The only interesting part is Nvidia getting their bets right repeatedly & the why behind that is likely interesting. Is lack of 1:1s the secret recipe…doubtful
- tverbeure 3y agoNvidia is amazing at changing course quickly. I joined 17 years ago to work for "a startup within the company". We were ramping up our group fast to design a product for an new market. 4 months later, Jensen sees that product at CES. Ours would be only be ready 2 years after that. The next Monday, he joined our weekly meeting and announced that our group was cancelled immediately and we'd be spread to existing BUs the next day. His words at that meeting: "Every morning when I wake up, I look in the mirror and check if the core assumptions on which I based my decisions are still valid. If not, I make the change immediately." So refreshing when you've come from a company where everyone knew a project was doomed, but nobody had the guts to pull the plug for months. Same thing happened a year later: we had a chip that was ready to tape out. That project was canceled on January 10th, 2007, because something happened the day before.
- Sebguer 3y agoThe announcement of the iPhone, presumably, to save people a google.
- datavirtue 3y agoGE...THIS is how it's done. Period. What I see described here is the exact opposite of what I witnessed at "the greatest management training company in the world." What a quagmire. They had the CEO from Cinnabon come in to give a talk and she laid down what sounded to me like a dress down of the management culture at GE....you could hear the whooshing jet noises as it went right over their heads.
- m3kw9 3y ago1:1s because they were too “busy” to notice. I’m for no 1:1s, but you need a right culture to get that to work
- intull 3y agoThere's a lot more context to each of the bullet points that seem more dramatic than how it feels in real life. But I want to put the spotlight on the 1-year and 5-year plans - that there aren't any. I feel that phrasing doesn't do justice because there's more context behind it. Yes, there may not be company-wide top-down 5-year plans or planning cycles. Don't mistake this to be your usual breed of agile. What folks work on are ultimately much longer-term visions. I think everyone sort of has/owns their own ideas and plans for how an area, product/service, project, whatever, should grow into, and everyone is asked to make an effort in communicating those. Internally, it's one giant networked negotiation machine. The company adapts well to changing circumstances and market needs, but NVIDIA is strategic and thoughtful - once it goes after something, it rarely backs off. And usually, NVIDIA is going after things others are actively avoiding because the problems in those spaces are too difficult. The consequence of such problem sets are visions that 10-20 year undertakings, if not more, that everyone chips away at bit by bit until one fine day things start taking solid shape. This is also made possible because everyone up the management chain, from ICs till up to JHH are technically adept. This is why sending out "top-5 things" works; not because it's written for everyone, but because everyone can read it. These emails aren't trimmed down. They are sent regularly. They can act as status updates but that's not their intention; they are literally what the title says "top five things" (on a team's agenda right now). A key relevant item that's left out in the tweet but JHH mentions in the referenced interview, is "strategy". Leadership, from the bottom-up ensures everyone's going in the right direction for a body of work in a given area. All of which funnel up to a general strategy that NVIDIA executes.
- bcatanzaro 3y agoA lot of people here are assuming that NVIDIA doesn’t do 1:1s because Jensen doesn’t do them. This is wrong. I’m Org3 (Jensen is Org1, so I’m one level below Jensen but don’t report to him). I have regular scheduled 1:1s with my Org2 manager. I have regular scheduled 1:1s with my Org4 reports and also with some of my Org5 and Org6 team members (on a reduced cadence as you would expect.) I don’t have 40 reports either - more like 15. It’s not true that NVIDIA doesn’t value professional development. It is true that Jensen is a special leader. He founded NVIDIA 30 years ago. No one leading a big tech company has the experience Jensen has. The whole company benefits from his vision. He is not always right, but he does learn fast and he works harder than anyone I know.
- gmerc 3y agoThis is commmon in organizations who have their founding leaders still active. Because they built the operation ground up and have the trust chains in place. The moment you have significant turnover of these leaders (any overall as a result of flagging growth) you are in reorgs territory
- kccqzy 3y agoWe all agree how important these founders are. But founders can't be in the company and working so hard forever. To me the more interesting question is what kind of structures the founders should leave to ensure good management even after the founders have left.
- working_nut 3y agoKey man risk is real
- cyanydeez 3y agoRisk is mostly that you hire an MBA who's compensation relies on 6month intervals
- gmerc 3y ago