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Comment by axegon_ | Hacker News Reader

I've worked long enough at large tech giants to know how things really are. Also a large part of the reason why I'd never join one again, no matter what they have to offer. Meta, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Openai, anthropic, oracle, nvidia, Microsoft, etc. - same shit with a different badge on top.

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TBH, having worked at all big-tech, startup and mid-sized companies, pretty much most has some major pros and cons of their own, and these days ever more so. With certain big-tech at-least there some chance of getting decent WLB.

I prefer hectic work and impossible deadlines at 3am over the flat-but-not-really hierarchy and the constant dick-measuring contests.

I don't think they are mutually exclusive, that if you take one you give another. TBH, its more about the team you work with than startup vs big-tech company thing.

I don't know how many of big-tech have flat hierarchy, at-least not the ones I've worked at and the people/team culture have definitely better. Were there times there was bureaucracy and all, sure, but I personally would take take good WLB most of the year, over fucking up my health/relationships over making some random software on claude code all night that these days anyway most want to be AI slop. If I've the energy to work extra, I'd work on my own hobby software projects.

That said, this or that, its all personal preference. So no wrong way of life here. Whatever, you want your life to be.

I don’t think Nvidia fits on that list. It’s a company with a pro-employee culture, very few layoffs, and many employees who have been there a long time.

It is also a company with a terrible history regarding open-source. AMD is much better from every point of view.

NVIDIA created quality (but proprietary) drivers for Linux early on, when supporting Linux at all was not a given. They should get at least a tiny bit of credit for this.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. They’ve all but abandoned these so called quality drivers since, so no, no credit is deserved.

What OS and whose drivers are running on all these NVIDIA-equipped computers today?

Unless it's a 24 hour clock. Then only once.

Achtually... if it's a 31556952 second clock, it's only right once a year.

Quality? Calling those "quality" is a bit of a stretch. Installing was and still is a gamble and so is every tiny system update. That hasn't changed a bit. And I'm saying that as someone who was first introduced to Linux on a Matrox GPU.

As long as one didn't have to downgrade X11, they were straightforward to install. You are right that upgrades was a pain, but I believe the drivers themselves were on-par with the Windows drivers.

To be fair, those were the best that were there back then.

But that was more than 20 years ago. Since then Intel came to work on Mesa, later AMD and various embedded GPU vendors, and now Nvidia is one of the worst options out there.

Doesn't help to be open source if they don't work as they should, and no one fixes the bugs anyway.

I have been through this three times with AMD APUs and dedicated GPU for laptops.

Well that's the interesting part actually, it's true that they don't give their Linux driver as much love as they could, but someone is fixing the bugs: Valve is doing an amazing job on AMD drivers. Something which would be totally impossible with the proprietary drivers of Nvidia. So exactly my point.

On some AMD drivers, mostly in what serves selling SteamDeck.

Which they could also do with proprietary drivers, or do you think Nintendo just sits around waiting for NVidia driver updates to the Switch?

Partner agreements exist for a reason.

My dad used to say "It's easy to be generous and kind when things are going well for you. You can only tell what a man is worth during hard times". Nvidia is at it's high financially. When shit hits the fan, things will start looking very differently. You only have to look at what kind of people Jensen is bffs with.

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