Mid-level Nvidia employee gets $62M in stock options; another lost it all | Hacker News Reader

Mid-level Nvidia employee gets $62M in stock options; another lost it all

tomshardware.com

49 pointsStratoscope37 comments

,,Sadly, this employee had to sell up his green gold to pay for losses when his broker “margined his account with another stock that fell 90%''

It wasn't just pure luck for the person who didn't use margin trading, like the other.

For any stock where the log price is moving in one direction with Brown motion, margin trading is just stupid, as it moves the log value of the asset held to minus infinity.

> log price is moving in one direction with Brown motion

Isn't the point of Brownian motion to move in both directions with equal probability? Why would it move to minus infinity?

I'd read "moving in one direction with Brown motion" to mean Brownian motion plus a linear term. If margin trading causes you to lose the asset, its value goes to zero, hence log of that could be said to be negative infinity.

(I'm not endorsing or disputing the conclusion of the comment).

It also often violates a company's insider trading policy to hold company stock in a margin account.

"We don't hold NVIDIA securities in a margin account or pledge NVIDIA securities."

https://images.nvidia.com/aem-dam/en-zz/Solutions/about-us/N...

18 years is a pretty exceptional tenure for any employee of any company.

Maxing out your ESPP and not selling a single share of any of the company stock you're given for 18 years is also pretty exceptional (and probably even bad financial planning).

I'm sure most Nvidia employees who were hired before the recent stock run up have made good money, but I doubt most of them are multimillionaires.

Most people I know sell most of their company stock when they get it, as they should. It's much more likely for you to make money with a diversified portfolio then holding a single stock.

I have to say honestly, the whole episode with NVidia's recent rise has left me quite demotivated about capitalism and the value of hard work. NVidia used to be a second tier job from the perspective of software professionals. The folks that worked there worked hard but it was not harder than any other top or mid-tier software company. That these folks hit the jackpot is great for them but quite senseless from the perspective of "you get rewarded for your efforts" perspective.

AI has been known to work and be important for many years. The reason NVidia is in the position it is, is more due to the work of OpenAI, which of course builds on the entire community's effort.

I'm trying to rationalize so this is a genuine feeling and perhaps a question. How does one rationalize such wind-falls. I know about lottery tickets but the number of people that got a payoff on this one is vast. And yes, I'll admit I'm jealous.

> That these folks hit the jackpot is great for them but quite senseless from the perspective of "you get rewarded for your efforts" perspective.

How is that senseless? Their efforts, in whatever way, contributed to the massive increase in the sale of the GPUs, right? And they were awarded for it.

If it wasn't Nvidia, but a start-up that was grinding for 10 years before they did well (eg Figma) would you feel the same way? Dig into that.

The point is that the rewards are clear and enormous, but the actual responsibility is way more diffuse. There will be plenty of people working at Nvidia who were less competent and less hard working than the person doing an almost identical job at ARM or AMD or Intel. But their reward will likely be 2-10x what those other people get.

The aggregate system seems to be efficient - capitalism has done a fairly good job at creating a successful innovative business environment, but the way it does that is just wild rewards predominantly for people who were in the right place at the right time.

There are people who are at Nvidia who are genuinely responsible for the great stuff that Nvidia has done in the last few years. But they're going to be a minority of the people who get rewarded.

> NVidia used to be a second tier job from the perspective of software professionals

Since when? It was always a very popular choice for those truly interested in HPC and ML.

I think the issue is there are a lot of people in the industry who actually don't care about the products they're building.

If you're working on building something you like, it'll always be fun and worth it.

> it was not harder than any other top or mid-tier software company

What the hell is a "top" or "mid-tier" company.

The kind of person who thinks like this is never going to make good money in this industry.

If you are truly valuable, you will get a Google level salary anywhere.

> The reason NVidia is in the position it is, is more due to the work of OpenAI, which of course builds on the entire community's effort

They've been working on this problem for decades. Back when NLP was almost dead and Precision Medicine was a pipe dream, it was Nvidia that was helping maintain the ecosystem.

> And yes, I'll admit I'm jealous

You definetly are, but you also don't seem to have the right mentality for this industry.

Being a generalist is useless. Being a domain expert the right application of technology in a specific industry is what gets you the big bucks.

I don't need a sklearn script kiddie - I need an sklearn script kiddie who also knows how to apply ML to my specific business domain.

> I don't need a sklearn script kiddie - I need an sklearn script kiddie who also knows how to apply ML to my specific business domain

sounds like you need consultants ;-)

You should’ve seen the Twitter post some time back about ML engineers at “tier 1 companies” discovering what SVD was because of LoRA

NVidia has been investing in Platform strategy for a long time. I have been reading nvidia research papers for a while, they probably invested a lot in their Omniverse and digital twin toolchain too.

NVidia was also the first company to bring real time raytracing into the market.

I don't think nivida was 'just' lucky.

Even the intel ceo was super cooky a few month back when he stated that.

Since when did the hardest jobs/putting in the most effort mean you were paid the most? If they were Software engineering would not even be in the top 100 hardest jobs....

Being a good software engineer in a team is indeed among the top 10 hardest mental job out there

Lol what. Even adjacent jobs like hardware engineering are much harder and pay less.

And there are so many more challenging mental jobs. Think ATC, think labwork, think academia in competitive fields, think sales, ...

Depends on how you define mental. Skills required in listed jobs are also social. Agreed on hardware engineering though !

JFC, I can't tell if this is serious or not.

>How does one rationalize such wind-falls.

By accepting that life isn't fair, and capitalism certainly isn't fair either. Working hard, and doing everything right, does not guarantee success. And when someone does have success, it's not necessarily to do with their actions.

It can't really be rationalized. All you can do is maximize your chances of living the best life you can.

Just have to come to terms that whole stock market and tech stock specially are in essence lottery. And rather distanced from any reality. In few years the valuations might be entirely different...

This has been Nvidia's play for over a decade. AMD was playing checkers with gamers and linux while Nvidia was playing chess with datacenter and actually putting out good software that made it all possible.

I mean its not like people who went to work at AMD during the last decade are poor peasants.

1. Life isn't fair. The earlier you accept that, the better off you'll be. This unfairness is why you're here posting on hackernews and someone through no fault of theirs is starving trying to cross the Sahara into greener pastures. It cuts both ways.

2. Hard work rarely ever implies financial success.

3. "...second tier job from the perspective of software professionals". Tiers are a made up concept. An Nvidia programmer working on critical HPC work is in a difference league than someone who is very good at making infinite scroll smooth.

Software is a broad field with different specializations. I don't know what you do but you made a bet and it's probably turned out quite well for you. Other people's bets did worse, others did better.

Comparison is the thief of joy. Remember to be grateful for where you are and how far you've come.

Thank you for your comment. These are all great points. I absolutely appreciate #1. #2 is a bit harder to accept as it implies I don't have agency. I always had the dogma that my hard work would make a difference from the perspective of financial success. And it has made a difference no doubt. The thing that has preoccupied my thinking is the magnitude. We're talking 100 to 1 when it comes to the impact of luck vs. hard work. This is a bit unsettling for me. Cest la vie I guess.

> #2 is a bit harder to accept as it implies I don't have agency.

Of course you do have agency to a certain extent, the important thing to recognize is that "hard work" leads to mostly linear gains, while to be "successful" (in the "getting $62M in stock options" sense) obviously requires some exponential windfall.

The idea that hard work is the only factor for financial success is a blatant lie, perpetuated by those wishing to justify the almost-Ponzi nature of modern economies. Ever wondered why GDP growth is in terms of percentage, while compensation for labor is linear to the effort/work put in?

> Life isn't fair. The earlier you accept that, the better off you'll be.

Life isn't fair because we make it so. The longer we keep accepting that, the longer we will delay in changing it for the better.

How do you suggest we make life fair? Some things you can make changes to equalize, but how are you going to equalize height or intelligence or something like that?

It isn't fair because entropy is uncaring. You can't control all the variables and so even if you had perfectly balanced society in spreadsheets, you couldn't implement it. This is the fallacy of city planners too, you can't control the human factor, the weather, the global community etc.

Even if we just talk money in one community, you could give everyone the exact same amount of money and through no fault of their own, some people would lose it and some would benefit wildly, because of the human factor. Person A starts a coffee shop that goes bust, person B starts a coffee shop that does well, just due to timing or luck or even the weather the month they opened.

>The folks that worked there worked hard but it was not harder than any other top or mid-tier software company.

Semiconductor industry is hard and pays less than webdev.

Hard work is no guarantee. Hardest job I ever had was as a teacher and you don't get paid shyte.

Yeah. Normally the stock goes to zero just as the company crashes and you lose your job - ask people from Lehmans.

It isn't always that extreme - you might just find you're part of a layoff round in a recession and your stock has only gone down 40%.

> However, there seems to be a problem at Nvidia with reports of wealthy Nvidia employees operating in semi-retirement mode.

Looks like Nvidia is in Google mode now.

Noam Bardin: Why I Left Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26165809

And John Carmack's response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170052

Last I knew, my intern mentor at MS claims to have never sold a share since he started in the mid-90s. I haven't talked to him in a while but if he really did keep stacking up MSFT for 30 years he'd be easily worth $62M. I don't think this is a sound investment strategy but glad it worked out for him.

literal survivorship bias

The same person who did that with Yahoo, or Cisco systems is definitely not in the same place.

> However, there seems to be a problem at Nvidia with reports of wealthy Nvidia employees operating in semi-retirement mode.

These employees made the company what it is.

Handing your hard-earned options to a random financial manager for margin trading is a major wtf and such a bad idea even in the foresight.

>However, there seems to be a problem at Nvidia with reports of wealthy Nvidia employees operating in semi-retirement mode.

Highly relevant:

>TIL what "FYIFV" means at Microsoft. "Fuck You, I'm Fully Vested" means that a person is so rich from Microsoft stock that he can be completely honest to coworkers and can leave anytime.

<https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1ax59rb/til_w...>

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