Some Nvidia Employees Work All Seven Days A Week
AI chipmaker Nvidia may be one of the world’s most valuable companies, and its employees are prepared to pay a steep price to keep it there.
Some employees are expected to be at their desks seven days a week and often until 2 am, according to Bloomberg News.
However, those workers are not prepared to leave the company due to its generous compensation package.
The people cited in the report include current or former employees who describe a tense work environment at Nvidia where meetings can often end up in shouting matches.
A former marketing employee there told Bloomberg News that she would at times attend up to 10 meetings per day, each with more than 30 people.
And although some of those meetings end acrimoniously, employees put up with it because of the “golden handcuffs”.
Nvidia has a low worker attrition rate due to the fact that its employees are given stock grants that typically vest over a four-year period.
Since 2019, Nvidia’s stock has surged by 3,776 per cent — meaning that employees who have been working there for the past five years are likely to be millionaires.
Last year, 5.3 per cent of employees left Nvidia. But after the company’s market capitalization exceeded $1 trillion, the rate of worker attrition fell to just 2.7 per cent.
Nvidia says that typically in the semiconductor industry, the rate of employee turnover is around 17.7 per cent.
A former engineer claimed that those who have been with the company for a decade have more than enough money to retire, but instead continue to work there because of a larger expected windfall when the next stock grant vests.
Nvidia employees are taking their considerable wealth and splashing it on sports cars, access to exclusive events such as the NBA finals and also on real estate – a property agent in Palo Alto claimed to have worked with several Nvidia employees who often make down payments of between 40 per cent and 60 per cent on homes worth millions of dollars.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and chief executive officer, told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview that he pushes employees hard because “if you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy.”
Recently, Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO and executive chairman at Google, walked back remarks he made at Stanford regarding Google now prioritising a work-life balance over winning. In his remarks at Stanford, Schmidt said, “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. The reason startups work is because the people work like hell.”
However, Schmidt followed those statements with an email to the Wall Street Journal where he admitted, “I misspoke about Google and their work hours. I regret my error.”