14 ms·

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

188 points by pg_1234 3y ago

knodi 3y ago
I believe Heroku is remote first also (maybe Saleforce also but not 100% sure).
pg_1234 3y ago
https://archive.ph/jzBIx https://archive.ph/jzBIx
gmerc 3y ago
For big tech specifically part of the issue is that they fired a significant percentage of people managers on the ground, often orphaning entire org trees - especially in remote offices. No longer having a good sense of what everyone is up to, they are using ye old attendance as a proxy for doing work. Idiots.
null0pointer 3y ago
How much of a corporate real estate portfolio do they have?
- 01100011 3y ago
  They just built the second of the two large buildings making up most of their HQ in Santa Clara. Those buildings were designed and selected well before the pandemic though.
hmmmcurious1 3y ago
Remote vs office is just smoke and mirrors. A company with a good product will thrive no matter the policy. Making a big deal of returning your cattle to the farm is just to soothe investors when you have a subpar product
- mathgeek 3y ago
  I like to compare it to releasing films in theaters vs streaming. The former has a large industry that has relied on it for decades, as well a subset of consumers that love it. The latter is more convenient for other consumers, as well as being embraced by some companies. Shareholders naturally want to take advantage of whichever is more profitable, which often is a mixture of the two.
  - nytesky 3y ago
    That is an interesting comparison, since streaming is bankrupting all the media companies and will likely change movie studios for the worst.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      Streaming is not bankrupting media companies, the fact that there are numerous other ways to spend your time viewing content from numerous other content makers is changing the market for media companies. Had media companies maintained their exclusivity on people’s screen time, then they would be in an even better position. But the supply of content exploded, from video games to YouTube to TikTok and Instagram and even forums like this one. More supply relative to demand means lower prices.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        It's probably also true that streaming almost certainly aligns to different types, quantity, and production values of content overall. And there are always ongoing demographic and public fashion trends going on as well. I agree with your point about competition. On the other hand, mindless channel surfing has mostly been replaced at the same time. People do it to some degree with streaming and even channels setup for the purpose--but it's a less natural fit.
      - sandworm101 3y ago
        And lower prices almost universally means lower profits for manufacturers. As prices fall, factories increase production and efficiency as they chase a diminishing profit margin. They are running flat out right until that margin disappears and everything suddenly stops. The frantic rate of tv/film production today, the insane production costs for a marginal return, fits that pattern.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lvl102 3y ago
Why are companies so hellbent on asking their workers to waste hours in commute? WFH hurts people with “soft” skills the most. MBA types.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  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 governments are deciding whether to crack down or rewrite the rules entirely. In some states and cities, policy changes have already been proposed to account for the new reality of hybrid work. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-threat-to-work-from-home-tax-breaks https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
  - pluc 3y ago
    That makes some sense. Massive amount of people converging on a downtown area does things to the local economy.. especially if that economy was adapted to cater 80% to them and 20% to tourists
  - _cenw 3y ago
    Maybe that's a small part, but even if you look internationally, 87% of CEOs in the 2023 CEO KPMG poll want return to the fiefdo-- office. https://kpmg.com/xx/en/home/media/press-releases/2023/09/ceo-outlook.html https://kpmg.com/xx/en/home/media/press-releases/2023/09/ceo...
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      Do similar tax breaks not exist outside the US? Seems like a sensible thing for the municipality to provide and for businesses to accept, in general.
      - 3y ago
kbos87 3y ago
I work for a large tech company that gives me complete optionality around where I work. What was largely an in-person culture has turned into one that is almost entirely remote and geographically distributed. For us, "remote work" isn't even a topic of conversation anymore, it's just the way things are. Yes there are some types of collaboration that aren't quite the same or require a little more effort, but we've largely navigated around those things. I often think about the contrast between my experience and what I hear has been a year of absolute hand-wringing on the part of our largest competitor who is adamant about return to office. They've had fits and starts, unhappiness at every level over the policy, and it all seems futile. I expect the arc of time this will play out across will be long, but I'm optimistic that our flexibility gives us a major hiring and retention advantage. Our competitor on the other hand just looks like they are distracting and handicapping themself.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  IME some companies just aren't able to pull off remote without major productivity loss. The culture just isn't set up for it. I don't think it's impossible to "fix" these companies, but it is quite difficult and would probably require replacing the entire leadership team. Many boards are understandably opposed to that and go with "let's just go back to how things were" instead.
  - api 3y ago
    One thing I’ve heard repeatedly: remote work is not just in person but with teleconferencing and more chat. It has to be managed differently. The organization has to change how teams are organized and operated.
  - re-thc 3y ago
    > IME some companies just aren't able to pull off remote without major productivity loss. What happened during the years of COVID? Was it fine? So could they really not do it? It's more a don't want to rather than can't.
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
sandworm101 3y ago
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 are of the best in the word, but there is only so much room at the top. Beware of starting careers so easily outsourced. 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.
- artemonster 3y ago
  I am perfectly fine with that, what are you trying to say with this?
  - ejb999 3y ago
    Do you want to compete with people who are just as smart or smarter than you, probably speak multiple languages, and are willing to work for 5-10% of what you get paid? pretty sure that is what the OP is trying to say. Some will thrive, many will not.
    - saberience 3y ago
      That's always been the case anyway. Remote work doesn't change that.
    - manmal 3y ago
      If those people are really that smart, they won’t work for 5-10% of US rates for long, but eventually find the highest bidder.
    - matwood 3y ago
      > Do you want to compete with people who are just as smart or smarter than you, probably speak multiple languages, and are willing to work for 5-10% of what you get paid? Where do people find these amazingly smart programmers for only 20-40k/year?!
hipparchus 3y ago
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 learning, to just generally noticing that they're struggling and stepping in to give them a hint / engage in a discussion, I just love the kind of "hands-on" aspect that you get from working in a non-remote environment. I want to ask my intern (my team is pretty small so we just take one intern at a time), to come 3 days a week at least just to be able to go through training with them like that, I recognise that people don't like it but I don't know how to do otherwise. I also can't help but feel like it helps to integrate the new team member in the team better, whereas a fully remote employee may end up being left out when part of of the team do see each other in office once or twice a week. But the prospect of either having a 2h long zoom call to see them act in a step by step manner, or to give them tasks and leave them by themselves until like 3h later to check in and see "ok, so, what'd you do? Oh, you got stuck on some dumb problem for 1h?" Feels shitty too. And I can totally understand interns that don't dare ask questions on slack for fear of bothering people in case they ask too many. Being able to just turn your head and ask someone next to you or a couple desks down is just so much easier. I don't mind people being remote once they've gained a sense of independence, but I feel like I just can't do the first 2-4 months with an intern fully remote. How do you guys do it?
- ghaff 3y ago
  I'm sure people will pipe up to say worked fine for me/us but it's definitely one of the specific issues (i.e. not generic culture, energy, etc.) that I've seen raised. I'm sure there are all manner of best practices--some of which a lot of companies don't follow in-person either. But, at the end of the day (absent any in-person time), you probably need to work harder and accept both inefficiency and that it just won't work for some people. I'd just add that socially I would have found it really difficult to graduate from school and worked from my apartment indefinitely.
- tintedfireglass 3y ago
  Thank god someone feels the same. No one cares when I put this argument forward against remote work especially for me as a junior/beginner dev
robes 3y ago
That has caused a very competitive job market, their HR doesn't even give the courtesy of a canned denial e-mail after applying for jobs.
penguin_booze 3y ago
In their ability to change colour on demand, those in C suite can put even the best of chameleons to shame. If executives' enthusiasm for remote work during pandemic days were an erect phallus, employees who counted on executives' words have climactic fluid on their faces. I expect nVIDIA to be no different; it's only a matter of time.
datavirtue 3y ago
Tech has always been hybrid with some people being 100% remote. I'm not sure what the point of all these articles are. Even at companies that had a butts-in-seats minimum days per week rule it was always guidance and actual compliance was left to the local manager. I would have a problem with metric based enforcement such as we are seeing with Amazon, though. Seems like management just wants to lay down rules and have them followed.
JonChesterfield 3y ago
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.
up2isomorphism 3y ago
Is fine with remote work does not really matter as long as they consider productivity as a criteria to evaluate the performance, which in general remote work will suffer. Also I have long wfh even before pandemic, the only employees that work remotely productively are those who work even harder at home than in the office. So essentially if you expect WfH making your life easier while being evaluated at the same level with others, you are probably wrong.
- tester756 3y ago
  >Is fine with remote work does not really matter as long as they consider productivity as a criteria to evaluate the performance, which in general remote work will suffer. Also I have long wfh even before pandemic, the only employees that work remotely productively are those who work even harder at home than in the office. data/citation needed
sesuximo 3y ago
They’re so rich they could do almost anything and it would “work” — at least in the short term.
deterministic 3y ago
WFH is a great way to find companies you want to work for. Companies that don’t allow WFH are almost guaranteed to be toxic and dysfunctional. Good developers have choices. Non-WFH companies miss out.
nojvek 3y ago
IMO the biggest shift with remote work is building a culture of writing and async communication. Like sitting down, thinking clearly, writing your thoughts and sharing. At Stripe, this was perhaps the biggest differentiator in their culture compared to anywhere else I’ve witnessed. Writing docs to clearly communicate where things are, where things are heading, where they should be heading was just as important as writing code. Many in-office companies don’t have that. Some higher ups make decisions after verbal chat, throw it down the decision chain. Every level down, some details are lost and the ICs don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. I have complicated relationship with Stripe, but their writing culture has made a forever impression on me.
- lnsru 3y ago
  I spent many years in a company without documentation culture. There were project plans for managers, but no single technical document. All the requirements were gathered during meetings verbally. So the guys who were for decades in the company were hiding information from new hires and that way were controlling everything. It was super toxic since nobody could advance without kneeling before all mighty old dude. This company couldn’t exist without office.
  - omscs99 3y ago
    Wow you just described my current gig, it’s like they have this inner circle of management/architects that just withholds information. No one documents anything. It’s a fucking mess

188 points by pg_1234 3y ago

knodi 3y ago

I believe Heroku is remote first also (maybe Saleforce also but not 100% sure).

pg_1234 3y ago

https://archive.ph/jzBIx https://archive.ph/jzBIx

gmerc 3y ago

For big tech specifically part of the issue is that they fired a significant percentage of people managers on the ground, often orphaning entire org trees - especially in remote offices. No longer having a good sense of what everyone is up to, they are using ye old attendance as a proxy for doing work. Idiots.

null0pointer 3y ago

How much of a corporate real estate portfolio do they have?

01100011 3y ago
They just built the second of the two large buildings making up most of their HQ in Santa Clara. Those buildings were designed and selected well before the pandemic though.

hmmmcurious1 3y ago

Remote vs office is just smoke and mirrors. A company with a good product will thrive no matter the policy. Making a big deal of returning your cattle to the farm is just to soothe investors when you have a subpar product

mathgeek 3y ago
I like to compare it to releasing films in theaters vs streaming. The former has a large industry that has relied on it for decades, as well a subset of consumers that love it. The latter is more convenient for other consumers, as well as being embraced by some companies. Shareholders naturally want to take advantage of whichever is more profitable, which often is a mixture of the two.
- nytesky 3y ago
  That is an interesting comparison, since streaming is bankrupting all the media companies and will likely change movie studios for the worst.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Streaming is not bankrupting media companies, the fact that there are numerous other ways to spend your time viewing content from numerous other content makers is changing the market for media companies. Had media companies maintained their exclusivity on people’s screen time, then they would be in an even better position. But the supply of content exploded, from video games to YouTube to TikTok and Instagram and even forums like this one. More supply relative to demand means lower prices.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      It's probably also true that streaming almost certainly aligns to different types, quantity, and production values of content overall. And there are always ongoing demographic and public fashion trends going on as well. I agree with your point about competition. On the other hand, mindless channel surfing has mostly been replaced at the same time. People do it to some degree with streaming and even channels setup for the purpose--but it's a less natural fit.
    - sandworm101 3y ago
      And lower prices almost universally means lower profits for manufacturers. As prices fall, factories increase production and efficiency as they chase a diminishing profit margin. They are running flat out right until that margin disappears and everything suddenly stops. The frantic rate of tv/film production today, the insane production costs for a marginal return, fits that pattern.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lvl102 3y ago

Why are companies so hellbent on asking their workers to waste hours in commute? WFH hurts people with “soft” skills the most. MBA types.

wildrhythms 3y ago
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 governments are deciding whether to crack down or rewrite the rules entirely. In some states and cities, policy changes have already been proposed to account for the new reality of hybrid work. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-threat-to-work-from-home-tax-breaks https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
- pluc 3y ago
  That makes some sense. Massive amount of people converging on a downtown area does things to the local economy.. especially if that economy was adapted to cater 80% to them and 20% to tourists
- _cenw 3y ago
  Maybe that's a small part, but even if you look internationally, 87% of CEOs in the 2023 CEO KPMG poll want return to the fiefdo-- office. https://kpmg.com/xx/en/home/media/press-releases/2023/09/ceo-outlook.html https://kpmg.com/xx/en/home/media/press-releases/2023/09/ceo...
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Do similar tax breaks not exist outside the US? Seems like a sensible thing for the municipality to provide and for businesses to accept, in general.
    - 3y ago

kbos87 3y ago

I work for a large tech company that gives me complete optionality around where I work. What was largely an in-person culture has turned into one that is almost entirely remote and geographically distributed. For us, "remote work" isn't even a topic of conversation anymore, it's just the way things are. Yes there are some types of collaboration that aren't quite the same or require a little more effort, but we've largely navigated around those things. I often think about the contrast between my experience and what I hear has been a year of absolute hand-wringing on the part of our largest competitor who is adamant about return to office. They've had fits and starts, unhappiness at every level over the policy, and it all seems futile. I expect the arc of time this will play out across will be long, but I'm optimistic that our flexibility gives us a major hiring and retention advantage. Our competitor on the other hand just looks like they are distracting and handicapping themself.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
IME some companies just aren't able to pull off remote without major productivity loss. The culture just isn't set up for it. I don't think it's impossible to "fix" these companies, but it is quite difficult and would probably require replacing the entire leadership team. Many boards are understandably opposed to that and go with "let's just go back to how things were" instead.
- api 3y ago
  One thing I’ve heard repeatedly: remote work is not just in person but with teleconferencing and more chat. It has to be managed differently. The organization has to change how teams are organized and operated.
- re-thc 3y ago
  > IME some companies just aren't able to pull off remote without major productivity loss. What happened during the years of COVID? Was it fine? So could they really not do it? It's more a don't want to rather than can't.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago

sandworm101 3y ago

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 are of the best in the word, but there is only so much room at the top. Beware of starting careers so easily outsourced. 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.

artemonster 3y ago
I am perfectly fine with that, what are you trying to say with this?
- ejb999 3y ago
  Do you want to compete with people who are just as smart or smarter than you, probably speak multiple languages, and are willing to work for 5-10% of what you get paid? pretty sure that is what the OP is trying to say. Some will thrive, many will not.
  - saberience 3y ago
    That's always been the case anyway. Remote work doesn't change that.
  - manmal 3y ago
    If those people are really that smart, they won’t work for 5-10% of US rates for long, but eventually find the highest bidder.
  - matwood 3y ago
    > Do you want to compete with people who are just as smart or smarter than you, probably speak multiple languages, and are willing to work for 5-10% of what you get paid? Where do people find these amazingly smart programmers for only 20-40k/year?!

hipparchus 3y ago

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 learning, to just generally noticing that they're struggling and stepping in to give them a hint / engage in a discussion, I just love the kind of "hands-on" aspect that you get from working in a non-remote environment. I want to ask my intern (my team is pretty small so we just take one intern at a time), to come 3 days a week at least just to be able to go through training with them like that, I recognise that people don't like it but I don't know how to do otherwise. I also can't help but feel like it helps to integrate the new team member in the team better, whereas a fully remote employee may end up being left out when part of of the team do see each other in office once or twice a week. But the prospect of either having a 2h long zoom call to see them act in a step by step manner, or to give them tasks and leave them by themselves until like 3h later to check in and see "ok, so, what'd you do? Oh, you got stuck on some dumb problem for 1h?" Feels shitty too. And I can totally understand interns that don't dare ask questions on slack for fear of bothering people in case they ask too many. Being able to just turn your head and ask someone next to you or a couple desks down is just so much easier. I don't mind people being remote once they've gained a sense of independence, but I feel like I just can't do the first 2-4 months with an intern fully remote. How do you guys do it?

ghaff 3y ago
I'm sure people will pipe up to say worked fine for me/us but it's definitely one of the specific issues (i.e. not generic culture, energy, etc.) that I've seen raised. I'm sure there are all manner of best practices--some of which a lot of companies don't follow in-person either. But, at the end of the day (absent any in-person time), you probably need to work harder and accept both inefficiency and that it just won't work for some people. I'd just add that socially I would have found it really difficult to graduate from school and worked from my apartment indefinitely.
tintedfireglass 3y ago
Thank god someone feels the same. No one cares when I put this argument forward against remote work especially for me as a junior/beginner dev

robes 3y ago

That has caused a very competitive job market, their HR doesn't even give the courtesy of a canned denial e-mail after applying for jobs.

penguin_booze 3y ago

In their ability to change colour on demand, those in C suite can put even the best of chameleons to shame. If executives' enthusiasm for remote work during pandemic days were an erect phallus, employees who counted on executives' words have climactic fluid on their faces. I expect nVIDIA to be no different; it's only a matter of time.

datavirtue 3y ago

Tech has always been hybrid with some people being 100% remote. I'm not sure what the point of all these articles are. Even at companies that had a butts-in-seats minimum days per week rule it was always guidance and actual compliance was left to the local manager. I would have a problem with metric based enforcement such as we are seeing with Amazon, though. Seems like management just wants to lay down rules and have them followed.

JonChesterfield 3y ago

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.

up2isomorphism 3y ago

Is fine with remote work does not really matter as long as they consider productivity as a criteria to evaluate the performance, which in general remote work will suffer. Also I have long wfh even before pandemic, the only employees that work remotely productively are those who work even harder at home than in the office. So essentially if you expect WfH making your life easier while being evaluated at the same level with others, you are probably wrong.

tester756 3y ago
>Is fine with remote work does not really matter as long as they consider productivity as a criteria to evaluate the performance, which in general remote work will suffer. Also I have long wfh even before pandemic, the only employees that work remotely productively are those who work even harder at home than in the office. data/citation needed

sesuximo 3y ago

They’re so rich they could do almost anything and it would “work” — at least in the short term.

deterministic 3y ago

WFH is a great way to find companies you want to work for. Companies that don’t allow WFH are almost guaranteed to be toxic and dysfunctional. Good developers have choices. Non-WFH companies miss out.

nojvek 3y ago

IMO the biggest shift with remote work is building a culture of writing and async communication. Like sitting down, thinking clearly, writing your thoughts and sharing. At Stripe, this was perhaps the biggest differentiator in their culture compared to anywhere else I’ve witnessed. Writing docs to clearly communicate where things are, where things are heading, where they should be heading was just as important as writing code. Many in-office companies don’t have that. Some higher ups make decisions after verbal chat, throw it down the decision chain. Every level down, some details are lost and the ICs don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. I have complicated relationship with Stripe, but their writing culture has made a forever impression on me.

lnsru 3y ago
I spent many years in a company without documentation culture. There were project plans for managers, but no single technical document. All the requirements were gathered during meetings verbally. So the guys who were for decades in the company were hiding information from new hires and that way were controlling everything. It was super toxic since nobody could advance without kneeling before all mighty old dude. This company couldn’t exist without office.
- omscs99 3y ago
  Wow you just described my current gig, it’s like they have this inner circle of management/architects that just withholds information. No one documents anything. It’s a fucking mess