Nvidia sees AI's “iPhone moment,” unleashes barrage of plans
investors.com
investors.com
That's 5 times the number of employees of companies like snapchat or Coinbase. Companies that accomplish very little in comparison.
This is exactly it, NVIDIA is continuously “understaffed” and many ICs end up splitting responsibilities across different projects at different places in the stack. In stark contrast to many other large companies where an SWE team might have several entire other teams of 10+ engineers just to support the tools, build systems, test runners, etc.
Engineering groups are more fluid and individual contributors get moved around a lot (relative to other companies) according to demand. And management groups don’t really have “fiefdoms” the same way they can at huge companies… possibly due to the controversial matrix management employed here.
The whole chip making industry was unable to meet demand for the last few years, so they probably aren’t under much pressure to downsize.