- 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.
They bet on AI, but it's more than that. What I'd say they seem to be good at is noticing what weirdos are doing and fairly quickly allocating resources to it.
1. CUDA. They noticed that people were using graphics shaders to do compute (GPGPU). This was extremely (really extremely) painful to program in. They created CUDA which is only somewhat painful to program in. Now, at this point, it wasn't that clear that GPU compute was a great market, but it opened up a bunch of opportunities.
2. After CUDA came out, Alex Krizhevsky came around and used it to implement a neural network. Now, this wasn't the first time someone had made a neural network with a GPU, but CUDA made it a lot easier to make a sophisticated one.
3. NVIDIA noticed that people were using CUDA to make neural networks, and created CuDNN and started sending out free GPUs to all of the academic researchers they could find, further cementing their lead in this area over AMD.
In big corporations it tends to be hard for some seemingly insignificant thing like people using your product for something it wasn't intended for to bubble up to top management where resources can be allocated to capitalize on it. It's especially hard to do this quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if this habit of Jensen's was responsible for NVIDIA being able to take advantage of these opportunities.
You 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.
People 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.
Group settings favor bolder, louder folks. But then he has email sampling. Besides a top manager directly cutting through layers changes communication culture. When facts and not presentation becomes focus of the group other sets of skills than political are becoming valued more.
Group emails are also places where the "loudest" get heard - it's not just physically having a strong voice, but being the sort of person who feels the need to speak even if they're unsure they're correct, or this is the right forum. I see the same people do that in both physical meetings and group email chains.
Sampling group emails likely has a similar bias to sampling large meetings.
It seems to me that someone who can directly voice their views is a more efficient employee than someone who needs another person (their manager) to use their time do it for them. A company biasing to more efficient employees seems reasonable. Group meetings have other issues but if you can't even do it in async text form...
Directly voicing views in a forthright manner is useful if the communication is meaningful and informed - which often isn't correlated with how "loud" it is.
If you consider it "loud" to be able to send out an email of five things to a group in a structured format that everyone at the company uses then I think we should just agree to disagree. I see that as not loud but having the expected level of communication skills to function in a company at anything beyond a junior level.
Sure, there's places where it's good, but it's always a balance - and large mailing lists are often a poor place for actual discussion and instead just get flooded with what ends up being "spam" to many viewers - being things unrelated to your own work that takes energy to filter through and pull out the chunks that are more relevant. In my experience there's few "large" email groups people actually look at, while most are pushed by an automated filter to whatever subfolder they never look at, so there's zero point to them still being on the email group. Anything possibly relevant will be missed anyway.
Emails being push rather than pull means you can't self-filter as easily - something more like a company forum may be better than email groups as it finer grained categorization than emails, while still being visible to anyone if there ends up being useful discussions between groups which wouldn't be the case if you had a thousand different email groups.
Nvidia is a /huge/ company doing a very large number of different things, there's probably not a lot that's actually relevant to everyone. Lots of people think what they say may be, often the "louder" people I mentioned, but it's probably not actually true.
Generally I find emails are a great place for 1-on-1 communication, OK for 2-3 people discussing things, but very quickly spiral into a mess if there's any discussion by a group - things get lost, threads get mixed up based on who happened to respond first, and taking things "off thread" exclude people based on arbitrary criteria of the responder anyway and are often invisible to anyone else.
Maybe OK for "declarations" that aren't actually for discussion, but that doesn't fit with the idea of a "flat hierarchy" engineer-driven workplace either.
> Sure, there's places where it's good, but it's always a balance - and large mailing lists are often a poor place for actual discussion and instead just get flooded with what ends up being "spam" to many viewers - being things unrelated to your own work that takes energy to filter through and pull out the chunks that are more relevant. In my experience there's few "large" email groups people actually look at, while most are pushed by an automated filter to whatever subfolder they never look at, so there's zero point to them still being on the email group. Anything possibly relevant will be missed anyway.
> Emails being push rather than pull means you can't self-filter as easily - something more like a company forum may be better than email groups as it finer grained categorization than emails, while still being visible to anyone if there ends up being useful discussions between groups which wouldn't be the case if you had a thousand different email groups.
I mean its stated fairly clearly that CEO reads these emails or rather randomly picks some to read every day.
It seems you're arguing based on some hypothetical view of Nvidia divorced from what the linked text and other comments state Nvidia actually runs like. I don't think it's fruitful to have a discussion where you simply make up something in your head and then argue based on that.
I often wonder what's the right balance between group and personal, as you say, 1:1 has issues, but groups have some too (extrovert can use more space).
>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?
The top-5 mailing lists seem like the way that is achieved. My personal experience is that as a line manager at a company I actually know a ton more about who is doing well across departments than the CEO probably does. My view is direct and unmoderated while the CEOs is not.
>1:1 are important, at least to connect to people.
The 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
> Nvidia bet on a good fast growing market early on (AI)
No. Early on they realized that supporting developers for GPGPU is important, and many industries have been well served by it, starting with computer graphics and gaming.
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.