Nvidia's Dirty Manipulation of Reviews [video]

I'm part way through watching this now, but have already noticed that Steve has not understood what Nvidia was talking about regarding "securing budget";

    > [6:46] in order to continue doing these types of interviews
    > [6:48] and for them to quote secure budget we  
    > [6:50] had to cover things a certain way in the  
    > [6:53] reviews that were totally unrelated to  
    > [6:55] the people we were even interviewing

The budget Nvidia is referring to is for their employees time, because they are paying for that employee to be interviewed. In my experience in biggish companies with "aggressive" cost-codes/time-sheets systems is that "project staff" are a cost that need all their hours attributed to a project or similar, otherwise the projects KPI's don't look good. So these thermal and latency engineers are predominately hired for "project" roles, and so they would be assigned to work on developing new products, or supporting existing products.

What isn't in that "project scope" is spending many hours preparing for and then doing interviews. That's something that suits "marketing", and so that department/function would be responsible for paying for those work-hours. And so then it makes sense that those marketing people want value for money, and hence want all their talking points included as part of the "deal" for them to fund the employee to do the interviews.

I work in engineering/CAD sector and have had a similar experience. One time I was on a project and made a 3D animation to simulate a particular construction process that was being designed. Then the marketing people saw the animation and wanted a better looking version created that they could then use for various things. And so as was the way of the company - I gave the standard response of "sure, just give me a time code for xxx hours and I will get it done". Then they ask for a detailed breakdown of those hours with target dates etc, so then you have to respond with "sure, just give me a time code for 4 hours work and I will get that done".

Every video GN makes about Nvidia products is trashing them. Well researched good journalism, but trashing them none-the-less. Nvidia's perspective makes a lot of sense. To quote Steve from the end of the video: "At some point, enough is enough".