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The way that Jensen Huang runs Nvidia: 40 direct reports, no 1:1s (twitter.com/danhockenmaier)
235 points by vinnyglennon on Sept 12, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 174 comments



The other anomaly is that Jensen talks all the time with ICs doing the work. I was only a couple of months into working at the company before I got to have a face to face discussion with him about a project I was working on. I have seen many mid-level engineers (IC4-IC5) give him deep dives in these group meetings. It can be very stressful being under Jensen's microscope, but it dramatically reduces the "let's show pretty slides to the CEO to show him everything is good" BS. I was previously at a startup 1/100th of this size where the CEO was far less connected to rank and file engineers, so it has been a really nice change.


This is described in The Toyota Way (CEO walking the shop floor, talking to people, using products, etc., and generally having deep dives). Bill Gates did deep dives in Microsoft in its eighties prime (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev..., and many other sources).

Bad CEOs will micromanage or only look mile-high.

Good CEOs will do deep dives, and use that to inform strategy, policy, and organizational design.


I've been on small teams where the direct manager was completely clueless about the day-to-day work of his 3 or 4 reports. These are professional meeting attenders, basically. 10+ years ago this seemed much less common in tech. Management was more technical and CEOs would actually talk to the ICs.


By and large leadership of engineering companies have been subsumed by finance heads. Boeing is the canonical example, but Intel also (and their attempts to course-correct haven't been super successful).


this might be unique to your experience.

I can't say the same about my own a decade ago. it was due to the employer I was with at the time. they valued "attendance" and "billable hours" way more than quality or even meeting deadlines, let alone talking tech execution with a product manager


I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately. Thinking over Chernobyl, Fukushima, and so many business scandals, I think this is the right way to run any organization, public or private. You just can’t have individuals encountering real issues of substance to the business without any voice to raise them to the highest levels of management. Moreover, I don’t know how any executive could expect to try and steer a behemoth of an organization when their only visibility into the business is at such a low resolution owing to the oversimplification baked in through so many reporting layers.


This is the right way to lead.

Everyone lies to leaders: https://www.rubick.com/everyone-lies-to-leaders/


Our branch / satellite office of 100 people recieved a visit from the CEO, whom I happened to walk past in the corridor on their 2 day visit. I looked them in the eye and said Good Morning - they looked away and said nothing.

They were gone 18 months later and only after the golden parachute had landed it turns out in addition to a multi million dollar salary they were padding the expense / travel account / banging their secretary.


Incompetent management is so commonplace in tech that it is practically a cliche. This example is how it's supposed to be in a healthy hierarchy.

It shows just how deeply imposters have infiltrated the industry. Somehow it has become conventional wisdom that people who are non-technical, or below average engineers, should manage the time of, and mentor engineers often much smarter, and more competent than them. That doesn't clear the bar of common sense.

There is value in having a hierarchy, some people are more competent, and better at planning, and time management, and interfacing with other people. Those people should be in charge of how other people spend their time. The confluence of those skills is rare. There are exponentially fewer people qualified to fill those roles than there are qualified to be engineers.

You shouldn't have managers unless you can find good ones. It is far better to spread management thin than to hire bad managers. You would never try to bring the quality of work, planning, and time management closer to that of a below average engineer, but that's exactly what happens when you bring in incompetent management.

It looks like Nvidia is doing it right. 40 is a high branching factor, and he can engage meaningfully with every one of them about their work.


You're just describing capitalism.


A lot of people here are assuming that NVIDIA doesn’t do 1:1s because Jensen doesn’t do them. This is wrong. I’m Org3 (Jensen is Org1, so I’m one level below Jensen but don’t report to him). I have regular scheduled 1:1s with my Org2 manager. I have regular scheduled 1:1s with my Org4 reports and also with some of my Org5 and Org6 team members (on a reduced cadence as you would expect.) I don’t have 40 reports either - more like 15.

It’s not true that NVIDIA doesn’t value professional development. It is true that Jensen is a special leader. He founded NVIDIA 30 years ago. No one leading a big tech company has the experience Jensen has. The whole company benefits from his vision. He is not always right, but he does learn fast and he works harder than anyone I know.


This is commmon in organizations who have their founding leaders still active. Because they built the operation ground up and have the trust chains in place.

The moment you have significant turnover of these leaders (any overall as a result of flagging growth) you are in reorgs territory


We all agree how important these founders are. But founders can't be in the company and working so hard forever. To me the more interesting question is what kind of structures the founders should leave to ensure good management even after the founders have left.


The leader/management dilemma is a dilemma and so far has evaded any solution. Some countries like Singapore explicitly tried to solve for it and still are, objectively failing.

Cycle: - Great Leader arises from a group of aligned leaders, more equal than his peers - Competing non aligned leaders are purged, creating strong execution momentum - The fellow leaders start hiring managers to take care of the day to day - Eventually leaders churn and managers take their place because they know the organization and finding aligned leaders is close to impossible. - Rinse and repeat - Eventually the Great leader (if he does not expire / retire) is surrounded by people who know how to run the organization within the box, but have never been allowed to think out of the box. All their success was in fact knowing how to maximize the inner workings of the box and not rocking the boat. - Leader leaves, game of thrones ensues.

This is in full display in most political parties. Take Germany or the UK: the qualifications to become leader are entirely different from the skillset to run the country (Hence the endless supply of prime ministers in the Uk who seem increasingly mediocre or downright incompetent). They absolutely know how to play the game to take the throne (chiefly loyalty to the cause) - but once on the throne, having to lead, requires entirely different skills they don’t possess.


Key man risk is real


Risk is mostly that you hire an MBA who's compensation relies on 6month intervals


A while back when I was just out of college, I had an interview at NVIDIA, so I requested to add Jensen on Linkedin. Not only he accepted the request, he even replied to my message with some advice and good wishes. It was a very heartwarming and a cool thing of him to do.


If you’re sitting of a money printer then damn near any org structure will work.

The only interesting part is Nvidia getting their bets right repeatedly & the why behind that is likely interesting. Is lack of 1:1s the secret recipe…doubtful


Nvidia is amazing at changing course quickly.

I joined 17 years ago to work for "a startup within the company". We were ramping up our group fast to design a product for an new market. 4 months later, Jensen sees that product at CES. Ours would be only be ready 2 years after that. The next Monday, he joined our weekly meeting and announced that our group was cancelled immediately and we'd be spread to existing BUs the next day. His words at that meeting: "Every morning when I wake up, I look in the mirror and check if the core assumptions on which I based my decisions are still valid. If not, I make the change immediately."

So refreshing when you've come from a company where everyone knew a project was doomed, but nobody had the guts to pull the plug for months.

Same thing happened a year later: we had a chip that was ready to tape out. That project was canceled on January 10th, 2007, because something happened the day before.


The announcement of the iPhone, presumably, to save people a google.


I thought nvidia did release phones?


Before the iPhone, multi-media phones had the modem as main chip with a companion chip that did GPU, video decoding etc.

With the iPhone, an SOC took center stage and the modem became secondary.


Huh? I don't think that's true for Windows Mobile 5 and earlier devices.


Windows 5 phones were a tiny niche. I don’t know what kind of architecture they used. But the general multimedia phone was still based on modem chip plus companion chip.

After the iPhone announcement, everybody realized that this model was a thing of the past. iPhone like phones were the future.

The companion chip market died that day, and the whole industry switched to developing only SOC models.


This is an interesting take.

Is there some place I could read more about this shift?

Thanks in advance!


The chance is high that you are reading this on a phone via a wifi connection right now. No (GSM) modem involved here.


>So refreshing when you've come from a company where everyone knew a project was doomed, but nobody had the guts to pull the plug for months.

And then the person who pulls the plug is blamed for it somehow.


Evidence based management. Nearly every bit published in the last twenty to thirty years about company culture and management has been harping on this. Ignored.


Nvidia might be going too far with that. They abandon good ideas too quickly and pursue stupid new things too often. Cryptocurrency were an example of that. I fear their obsession with AI might be the next one. They should focus more of their energies towards the consumer GPU market. I believe that graphics are still their bread and butter, and not taking that market seriously will cost them in the long run.


You're kidding right?

Nvidia never went into cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies went into Nvidia. Nvidia actively tried to sell GPUs to gamers instead of crypto people because crypto people will flood the used GPU market when the bubble inevitably pops every single time.

Nvidia isn't abandoning the consumer GPU market. They're still the leader by far. The consumer GPU market has actually been declining for nearly 20 years now.[0] They should not invest more into a declining market.

AI is the correct market to put their eggs in.

[0]https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/osFsEsoUthvCrzKiF5aoLn-120...


Nvidia sold dedicated crypto mining cards. It definitely did went into crypto.

They are charging non-competitive prices for their consumer GPU market. This is opening the door to more competition.

The desktop discrete video market is not the same thing as the consumer GPU market. You are ignoring a huge sector of integrated GPUs and mobile GPUs.


>Nvidia sold dedicated crypto mining cards. It definitely did went into crypto.

They crippled normal GPUs and sold them to miners. They did this because once the crypto bubble pops, the used GPU market won't be flooded.

>They are charging non-competitive prices for their consumer GPU market. This is opening the door to more competition.

Ok, so what? All companies do this when they're the leader.

>The desktop discrete video market is not the same thing as the consumer GPU market. You are ignoring a huge sector of integrated GPUs and mobile GPUs.

Nvidia does focus on laptop GPUs. It's much bigger than desktop discrete GPUs. Nvidia doesn't have a way to get into phone GPUs because they're tightly controlled by Apple, Qualcomm, and Mediatek. That's why they tried to buy ARM.


They usually sell crippled GPUs to the low end of the market. That's a segment of the market they no longer really serve. They also didn't do anything to hide the fact that their GPUs were really being sold to miners and not gamers, something they got fined doing.

Their leadership is going to be transitory since they are not being competitive. Intel would never had entered the discrete GPU market if nVidia keep prices low. Lack of mobile GPUs and integrated GPUs is a red flag that they're charging too much money. Discrete laptop GPUs is a niche of the market. It is not what most laptops use.


>They usually sell crippled GPUs to the low end of the market. That's a segment of the market they no longer really serve. They also didn't do anything to hide the fact that their GPUs were really being sold to miners and not gamers, something they got fined doing.

1. Low end GPUs have extremely small profit margins. It's smart business decision to not lower prices in a declining discrete GPU market. Business 101.

2. Nvidia did not sell GPUs directly to miners. They had no control/no way of verifying what the GPUs will be used for. And who cares if they sold to miners? It's just business at the end of the day - free market.

>Their leadership is going to be transitory since they are not being competitive. Intel would never had entered the discrete GPU market if nVidia keep prices low.

Their leadership is extremely competitive.

Nvidia prices GPUs at the price the market is willing to pay. It has nothing to do with "greed" that you seem to be suggesting. Business 101.

Intel needs to enter the GPU market because AI runs on GPUs as well. It's both gaming and AI. Intel needs to be in the AI market or they're toast.

>Lack of mobile GPUs and integrated GPUs is a red flag that they're charging too much money. Discrete laptop GPUs is a niche of the market. It is not what most laptops use.

No clue what you're talking about. Cite the source for lack of mobile GPUs? You mean laptop GPUs right? Nvidia doesn't make SoCs for phones or laptops.

Discrete laptop GPUs outsell discrete desktop GPUs. While it's not what most laptops use, it's still a much bigger than desktop GPUs.


1) That's the point. A cheap GPU for low-end gamers. Pursuing profits over expanding your business is a bad idea in the long-run.

2) They did, and more importantly did not try to stop it from happening. They could have banned bulk sales or whatever. Through inaction, they created huge shortages.

At the end of the day, their advantage is really via a few things: software support and somewhat more advanced technology. Few people really cares about the actual hardware behind their gaming rigs. In places like game consoles, nVidia already lost a lot of ground because they weren't willing to cut costs.

The vast majority of laptops have integrated GPUs. I don't have exact numbers for laptops, but for PCs in general, it is integrated graphics: https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-is-already-matching-amd-for-ga...


> Every morning when I wake up, I look in the mirror and check if the core assumptions on which I based my decisions are still valid

is it that mirror from snow white or does he base his decisions on whether he was sunburnt or not the previous day?


It'd be interesting to compare the trajectory of ATI/AMD to NVIDIA and the decisions that got them there. From outside it looks like nVIDIA's huge emphasis on software, and supporting development, while developing GPGPU code with AMD seems far harder.

I could see a flat, engineer-focused hierarchy enabling that direction.


The painful part is when it implodes.

Look at Facebook before and after the ad money dried up. [1] then [2]

It's all fun and games until the investors aren't happy.

Nvidia is enjoying a strong cash influx of demand due in no small part to a certain blockchain boom. Now they are capitalizing on the ML surge (as they should!).

Where will that management style be in a few years? Let's stay tuned.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3003771/how-mark-zuckerberg-and-... [2] https://theconversation.com/why-metas-embrace-of-a-flat-mana...


> sitting of a money printer

This is a pretty recent phenomenon, isn't it? For most of it's existence net margin was 0-15%, and only blew up to 25-35% with the push into data center around ~2016.


Well they were in the right place for:

1) GPU intensive gaming

2) Crypto

3) AI

Regardless of margin % that's a stupidly good read on the future hotness. Luck maybe...but 3x luck idk


> Regardless of margin % that's a stupidly good read on the future hotness

For sure. Was just pointing out that "money printing", which I could classify as disproportionately profitable, is more recent. As a stockholder I'm perfectly happy with their increase in CAGR over the last few years. If they made this many good bets with the income they had to invest in R&D, I'm hopeful that they can scale with larger budgets.


Also at the SVP/VP levels they don't have "normal" "what are your dreams" kind of 1/1s. They chat on a golf course on Sundays!


Having a lot of direct reports is probably a symptom of Huang knowing what he is doing. And from that comes the right bets and money.


What bet? That we will need more matrix computations in the future?


1:1s are a peculiarly American thing (in my experience) - perhaps something to do with the individualistic yet somewhat still old fashioned and hierarchical business culture?

1:1s are problematic because they discourage/displace lateral communication between team members and encourage siloing. Everyone has to guess what 'the boss' said to the others, and to figure out which piece of the puzzle they've been entrusted with - classic oppressive divde and conquer strategy. Of course for people who may not be comfortable in social settings, 1:1s may be the only thing they can grapple with properly.


That's odd. 1:1s shouldn't be used for normal every day work and project activities. It definitely shouldn't be just a status update to your manager. For me they are a way of checking in on longer career and growth goals that can be neglected when caught up in the "real work". They are also where I check in on promotion readiness and ensuring expectations are aligned. Things which you typically don't want the rest of the team in on. Anything directly project related should be either a team meeting or shared via more open communication channels.


Right! So every quarter or maybe once a month max then.


Yeah, whatever works for you. When I was at a place that did regular 1:1s, my manager always stressed that they're for me, not for the company, and if I want to change the frequency of time I should just let them know. Not sure about your company culture, but if you're already experienced, I can't imagine your boss would be unhappy if you said "you know, I don't need so much guidance, let's have less 1:1 meetings". Assuming most of the communication happens in regular team meetings, which seems healthy.


This is exactly what I do. For the first month or so I recommend weekly 1:1s, just to make sure they are adapting well and getting the things they need. There are a lot of internal systems to navigate, tons of folks they should get to know, etc. But once they are a bit "settled" the frequency is really up to them with a minimum of once a quarter. I've been in companies before where managers only met with their employees for things like this once a year at review time! This often led to resentment and morale problems when performance reviews didn't align with employee expectations and by the time they find out it's too late to course correct. You must keep folks appraised of how well they are meeting expectations both good and bad. The "annual review" should contain no surprises for anyone.


So many people missing the point of 1:1s. They help to build a trust relationship between two people so that when there is something difficult to discuss, that conversation can happen. It is perfectly ok for most 1:1s to be fairly empty, if only so that once a quarter/year/whenever, you can have the promotion discussion/hopes-and-dreams chat/you're not meeting expectations wake-up call.

This isn't an "American" thing, that's a very inaccurate generalisation. Maybe more correct to say that 1:1s are useful in cultures where trust needs to be built before saying difficult things. Sure, people from some cultures can just bluntly say difficult things. That's fine. Many people cannot.


If you leave your 1:1's with no thought beyond "what did the boss say to everyone else" you either have a terrible boss or an even more terrible Machiavellian corporate culture.


> you either have a terrible boss or an even more terrible Machiavellian corporate culture

Both of which abound, in my experience. If your "boss" is paying you as an "employee", that's still a competitive situation between two businesses: the business of you selling your labour, and your boss, a.k.a. your only customer, who may try to use information warfare to get the best deal.


You will probably disagree, but I see 1:1s with my manager as an opportunity to schmooze and re-iterate my accomplishments (I tend to be good at my job). I also tend to be an introvert, but I can turn on the charm as well as the bullshit if it is worth the effort.

Basically, I try to engineer 1:1s in my favor if I can - usually only upside opportunity in my case. If I can't, I would probably avoid them.


>Of course for people who may not be comfortable in social settings, 1:1s may be the only thing they can grapple with properly.

In my experience, group discussions favor a very small subset of people, and it has less to do with comfort in social settings and a lot more with domineering personalities.


I appreciate your opinion and although I disagree, I'm curious about how you handle talking to reports about their careers, the work they've been doing, progress on their goals, problems they are encountering, etc.?


All of that sounds like something that could happen annually.


Annually? You think the right cadence to see if one of your direct reports is progressing toward their goals or having difficulties is once per calendar year?


That's how most companies work, if that frequently, with difficulties handled by exception. Only in big tech is that the focus of the "work" and do you have managers who spend their time on it, leading to the "professional meeting attenders" mentioned elsewhere.


My experience with 1:1s is that they uncover things that wouldn't be uncovered... well, without 1:1s.

Most of us are "trained" not to "bother" our managers so allocating some dedicated time is valuable in my experience.

I'm honestly baffled at the pushback against 1:1s I'm reading. Assuming you have a relatively normal number of direct reports for software engineering (5-10) that adds up to not a lot of hours.

At companies without regular 1:1s, I often had no idea if my manager thought I was doing a good job or not. You can say that this is bad management or bad communication, and you're right but management and communication tend to be rather poor in our industry! 1:1s are more often than not a part of the solution.


yes, at a company, which has been running for several decades, each of my manager’s made sure to ask what I wanted to do with my career. To not ask, one may infer that there isn’t much career advancement available.


It's not just the tech industry. For better or worse, frequent 1:1 meetings with direct reports are a common management practice in most large US companies.


This is an interesting take.. But you know what, thinking about it, I might prefer having n:1s where it's the whole team together. A kind of team level all-hands, but much more personal as well. Discuss what everyone has done, their career goals, opportunities, etc.

I think if that kind of transparency at the team was put in place and people got used to it, I think you're right, it kind of aligns the whole team on everyone's goals, and everyone knows where everybody is and who's where in their career with regards to promotion and what not. And who the manager think should be given what opportunity and responsibility next, etc.


The extroverts and the highly confident tend to dominate that type of discussion.


Even if say the manager round robinned through the team?


> 1:1s are a peculiarly American thing

I had regular 1:1s when I worked for Huawei.


In the UK I've experienced 121s and I feel like it's more about having a higher point of contact for an employee, where you can discuss anything you want in longform, including personal development, but also day to day issues, what's been annoying, who's been annoying, what could be improved, other suggestions etc. Things that higher management do not have time for (to dedicate 30-60 minutes to sit down with each employee).

Then those longform discussions are summarised and points raised higher up the chain as needed.


I absolutely despise 1-on-1s. It's either me complaining about corporate policies that I have no power to change (looking at you, WFH) or some feature is a complete dumpster fire and I get lectured about it.


1:1s are a peculiarly American thing (in my experience)

At literally every company I've worked in Sweden the managers have sat down with everybody directly under them for a 1:1 twice a year.

Where you work are salary, promotion and general career development discussions done in open meetings with the whole team?


To clarify - I mean weekly 1:1s. Of course I would expect annual/quarterly 1:1s for career stuff


    No status reports, instead he "stochastically samples the system"

    - Doesn't use status updates because he believes they are too refined by the 
    time they get to him. They are not ground truth anymore.
    - Instead, anyone in the company can email him their "top five things" with 
    whatever is top of mind, and he will read it
    - Estimates he reads 100 of these everyone morning
I like this idea.


In practice, each org has a top5 mailing list to which employees send weekly updates. Jensen samples from these mailing lists.


Who can read the mails sent to each org's top5 mailing list? Can ICs subscribe?


everyone in the org can read them. One can also subscribe to other org's mailing lists.


Awesome.

I'm a software guy who for 1.5 years worked for a hardware company with a relatively strict upwards-only information reporting structure. It wasn't even for secrecy, it's just that the people running it didn't understand the concept of collaboration at all. They were a mix of physicists and economists. Really smart but also, as it turned out, very 'square' people. It was a relatively small company, around 100 people.

It felt quite soul-crushing after a busy week to have to spend mental efforts writing up a report to someone 1-3 levels up... especially if you had no idea if it was ever read. And then do this every single week. If colleagues could read and learn from this effort it would make a lot more sense.

Never again. Went back to the relatively speaking much saner software world after that experience.


Thank you for the articulation of the issue and your experience dealing with it. Were you aware of the articulated issue (the absence of collaboration) while you were there? Or did it only become clear in retrospect? I imagine in an environment like this it would be easy to get lost in the feeling of being undervalued and disrespected, without being clear of the source/cause of that feeling (unhealthy organizational culture).


Thanks for the interest but no.


> It felt quite soul-crushing after a busy week to have to spend mental efforts writing up a report to someone 1-3 levels up... especially if you had no idea if it was ever read.

There are ways to test that.

You could just not submit the report, and see if anybody complains.

Or prepare the report, but intentionally corrupt the file before submitting it, and see if anybody complains.

Or prepare the report, and in it ask if anyone is actually reading it, and ask that they contact you if they are.


I needed to submit a .pptx file with 1 or more slides that my manager would manually insert into his weekly presentation deck to the exec team.

I admit I never had the guts to submit a slide which asked if anyone was reading it. It did cross my mind.

(It was a Microsoft-by-default-company, as many small hardware/research-oriented companies often are, I guess.

There was also that one week epic fight needed to get approval to run MacOS/Linux in the new "software department".)


> - Doesn't use status updates because he believes they are too refined by the time they get to him. They are not ground truth anymore.

Facts. I worked in a place where one my primary work outputs was a weekly high-stakes status document, and boy this document was refined, and agonized over, and wordsmithed, and revised, and re-revised, and softened, and distilled, and lenghtened, and shortened, until it was precisely the exact narrative that the VP and SVP needed to hear. By the time it went through the hands of dozens of engineering managers and was submitted, it was far, far divorced from reality. Then, rinse and repeat next week. I don't know if/how leadership had a clue what was really happening.


Yeah, but it works if someone reads and cares.


I'm not saying these are good or bad. But I note that every time a company becomes "hot", people start mindlessly copying its quirks, as if those are the things that make the company. They might be, or they might not.

Reminds me of a friend who didn't wear socks because Einstein didn't wear socks. The implication being "he doesn't wear socks and he's smart, so if I don't wear socks I'll be closer to being as smart as Einstein". Ok, we were like 8 years old, but still.


This drives me crazy. let's adopt the practices of this blog post from an org 100x larger than ours, building a product which is in no way similar to ours... why?


there's a massive number of good takeaways in this article (and comment thread) on building an agile organization with evidence-driven leadership and rock-solid and reliable product execution. "in no way similar to ours" is an embarrassing take for any member of a product-driven organization to take here.

there are very very few industry-defining CEOs who are at the helm of the companies they founded 30 years ago and leading an industry that they essentially designed and built themselves, riding a money-train on an entire class of product and a product-use case they defined from the ground up. the fact that huang has done this multiple times means he's worth listening to. he's managed to run a (now) trillion-dollar corporation like an agile startup and maintained an extreme level of technical excellence and long-term realized customer value (every CUDA testimonial ever, etc), and that's cause he can run his OODA loop faster than anyone else and actually get good products out the end.

no, you don't have to wear the turtleneck or leather jacket and yell at underlings. yes, absolutely you should think about evidence-driven leadership, being agile and willing to pivot and throw away your product and move to something else if it's not going to work, eschewing formalized "busywork" 1:1s in preference for having the CEO actually "stochastically sampling" the IC work output, and making sure the voices from the boots on the ground are being heard.

there is almost no tech company for which those are not great principles that you should probably strive to incorporate. and "wow we have nothing in common with that" probably speaks more about your corporate culture than you think.


You would do well to read the thread you are replying to, I was replying to this:

> I'm not saying these are good or bad. But I note that every time a company becomes "hot", people start mindlessly copying its quirks,

Also, nowhere did I say I work at a tech company, I do not.


Hey, 40 direct reports is accepted best practice! Remember when google did that? My manager was a poser back 15 years ago, he had only 20 direct reports - I'm not making this up.


No one on ones is probably to protect from sexual assault allegations. No time alone == safe.


It saves on communication time, less repeating.

I get a lot of cold emails from my website, asking me things. I ask those corresponding with me to ask the questions on my BBS instead, so when I take the time to answer, the answer benefits more than one person, and there is increased ROI on the time and energy spent constructing a thoughtful reply.


Well hold up, I do 1:1s with people at least every two weeks, but I haven't actually breathed the same air as one of them since the beginning of summer. (We both drove to that empty building downtown and had lunch, IIRC.)


Hmm, we'll probably see you in the people's court soon.


The people that imitated Steve Jobs' worst traits under the auspices that they were "as smart and driven" as him and therefore should mimic some of these traits was rather maddening.

I honestly believe there was an entire generation of young managers who thought that it was OK to wear turtlenecks every day and be an abrasive asshole.


When that big Steve Jobs book came out, seemingly overnight every manager up the totem pole from me suddenly became mini-Steves, minus the creativity and product judgment.


YC talks about exactly this idea, cargo culting startups: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/IR-dalton-michael-silico...


Well, it's a piece of evidence on the other side about necessary operations. One still has to choose to build one's company in one shape or the other, and ideally one does not cargo cult other companies or try to innovate on simple things but there's a lot of value in just choosing to go your own way if you're right.

Things I liked about his stuff are the idea that every management position is a growth position. Some are, and in some you're just ensuring that superstars can play the right way. And you can land where you want on that.


> But I note that every time a company becomes "hot", people start mindlessly copying its quirks

This is also true of successful people and their secrets to success. With survival bias, it's hard to differentiate noise from cause


Didn't Einstein wear socks? Seems like a misunderstanding. Sounds more like Steve Jobs to me


shoes


And so, microservices and kubernetes were thrust upon the unsuspecting world.


There's a lot more context to each of the bullet points that seem more dramatic than how it feels in real life. But I want to put the spotlight on the 1-year and 5-year plans - that there aren't any. I feel that phrasing doesn't do justice because there's more context behind it.

Yes, there may not be company-wide top-down 5-year plans or planning cycles. Don't mistake this to be your usual breed of agile. What folks work on are ultimately much longer-term visions. I think everyone sort of has/owns their own ideas and plans for how an area, product/service, project, whatever, should grow into, and everyone is asked to make an effort in communicating those.

Internally, it's one giant networked negotiation machine.

The company adapts well to changing circumstances and market needs, but NVIDIA is strategic and thoughtful - once it goes after something, it rarely backs off. And usually, NVIDIA is going after things others are actively avoiding because the problems in those spaces are too difficult. The consequence of such problem sets are visions that 10-20 year undertakings, if not more, that everyone chips away at bit by bit until one fine day things start taking solid shape.

This is also made possible because everyone up the management chain, from ICs till up to JHH are technically adept. This is why sending out "top-5 things" works; not because it's written for everyone, but because everyone can read it. These emails aren't trimmed down. They are sent regularly. They can act as status updates but that's not their intention; they are literally what the title says "top five things" (on a team's agenda right now).

A key relevant item that's left out in the tweet but JHH mentions in the referenced interview, is "strategy". Leadership, from the bottom-up ensures everyone's going in the right direction for a body of work in a given area. All of which funnel up to a general strategy that NVIDIA executes.


- 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.

Both are probably needed. You need to mix.


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.


For me, shadow governance is intrinsic to large organizations.

It's going to happen.

At these "open" nVidia meetings, I'm sure cliques are texting on MSFT Teams or SMS.

I'm skeptical that 1:1 here means no 1:1 contact and rather no recurring meetings with reports.


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.

Why is connecting to people important?


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.


Connection to people is important and grown ups can sort out how and when.


This is a psy-op to get AMD to have this horrible management structure.


> Does not conduct 1:1s - everything happens in a group setting

I don’t believe that. There’s really no confidential matters he discusses with team members on a 1-on-1 basis?


I think they are referring to regular, scheduled, private standing meetings between a manager and their subordinate. They are often called "1 on 1s". Of course he talks to folks in private when needed.


“Does not schedule 1:1s” likely doesn’t mean “never has 1:1 conversations in his life”. I have no idea what being a ceo of a infinity-dollar company is like, but I imagine he’s on somewhat amicable terms with many of his reports, and many opportunities outside of scheduled meetings to talk with them. Slack, for example - assuming he’s not pulling a Sundar ;)


Depends what you mean by group, but ya, even 'personal' meetings probably have a member of HR in the room.

There is no thing as so confidential that only 2 people need to know it.


In my experience, if HR is in the room for a 1:1:1 personal meeting, things are not going well for at least one person in that meeting.


>even 'personal' meetings probably have a member of HR in the room

That seems ludicrous at any company I've worked for absent some serious HR-related issue.


I love this. When I was CEO of a roughly 60-person startup, one of the things I told my (then-new) executive team was, I don't do 1:1s and I'm not here to develop you professionally. If you require professional development, I made a mistake placing you on my executive team. It helped establish a culture of execution and high standards.

It also fostered a lot of trust and cohesion. Everyone knew they were there because they deserved to be there, and so it made it very easy to make fast, correct decisions without a lot of bullshit. They were a great group and I felt lucky to have them on the journey.


Everyone regardless of status, position and experience requires professional development. Otherwise you claim omnicience. Finding willing participants to seed a narcissistic pyramid of self congratulation who are willing to forego this, to furnish either their ego or yours (or both) is commendable, however.


I believe the idea is that these individuals are expected to develop themselves through a combination of self-awareness, autonomy, ambition and an environment that promotes growth.

Executives are expected to be mature enough to not need hand holding.


As I see it if you don't have the self-awareness and feedback gathering skills to understand the things that aren't going well then no amount of "professional development" will help you succeed at a high impact executive role. The CEOs job in that case isn't to fix that but to fire you and then reflect on why they made such a bad hire.


This seems like an abuse of the word need. Most of “professional development” is self-actualized, and a product of experience, ability, and achievement on the job.

I think explicit PD makes sense at a big corporation or even a medium sized firm, but not in a startup environment where every second counts.


The idea is that Professional Development should be sought elsewhere, not from the CEO. That's not the same as 'no one needs professional development'.

If you do not do Professional Development, and make this clear to your hires whom you expect to be pretty good at their job functions already, I do not see how it should be treated as cultivating yes-men. 'I don't do Professional Development' is also not the same as 'I can't take feedback or let someone call a spade a spade'.


> Otherwise you claim omnicience.

No, he simply claims the team was already competent enough to execute at the level required and without egos weighting them down.


Eh, maybe, or maybe you just don’t know what you’re talking about. Your reply is quite a reach on the presumption spectrum!

The culture we needed in that moment was one of high standards, of directness and honesty, of pressure to do the best work. My message fit the necessary culture, and the outcome was exactly the team I had hoped to shape. I still remain friends with these folks to this day.

We were hardly self-congratulatory; quite the opposite, we were completely without ego and laser-focused on doing right by the company and our teams, and I’m proud to this day of how we ran things.


we were completely without ego

When did that change for you?


I suppose the first question is.

What's in it for me?

What's on the table here?

This to me sounds like a culture of no support for technical staff, no listening, and helicopter management when things go wrong.

And no training budget.


Just because something sounds bad to you doesn’t make your speculation accurate.

> and no training budget

You’re just speculating. And this GP was referring to his executive reports, not the ICs.


Presumably a lot of money and mental health issues.


How did that work out? I am wondering how much to take out of that anecdote without more info on how that company did with you as CEO.

You are talking in a past tense, and I can’t help but wonder about the reason for that.


It turned out great. We had fantastic teams, wonderful memories, left with great career stories. We still stay in touch and have great memories of our work together. I spent ten years helping to build it, but we sold and a year later I decided I was ready for a new chapter. Really lucky. Doesn’t mean it was easy. It was not.


This is the 'we're building for an exit' school of executive management, not 'we're building a sustainable business over the long term'. Which is fine if that's all you're interested in.


GE...THIS is how it's done. Period.

What I see described here is the exact opposite of what I witnessed at "the greatest management training company in the world." What a quagmire.

They had the CEO from Cinnabon come in to give a talk and she laid down what sounded to me like a dress down of the management culture at GE....you could hear the whooshing jet noises as it went right over their heads.


With 40 direct reports, he can pay attention to each one for at most about an hour per week on average. (Even if he works crazy hours, you have to factor in overheads and other tasks.)


Only having your boss bother you for an hour a week doesn’t seem so bad.


1:1s because they were too “busy” to notice. I’m for no 1:1s, but you need a right culture to get that to work


[flagged]


Imagine being seriously convinced Nvidia is falling apart.


Imagine being seriously convinced Nvidia is a good example of a successful tech company, and that Jensen is just a quirky startup CEO and should be worshipped like how people worship Steve Jobs (which is also wrong to do, fwiw).

Again and again, Nvidia does everything possible to make shareholder value look good, while robbing both shareholders and customers of value.


Those are opinions not facts.

Anyway, I was writing a longer post but I'll summarize it very simply: lack of competition in the GPU market (which is the cause of your overblown points) isn't Nvidia's fault.


Lack of competition may not be their fault, but it can be the reason they're sitting on third base thinking they hit a triple. Being successful while you're in a low-competition position doesn't necessarily mean you're running your company well.


How isn't it Nvidia's fault? Nvidia refuses to compete.

They refused to compete for the Sony contract, they refused to compete for the Microsoft contract, they've refused to compete for countless Top500 supercomputer contracts. They didn't just not win the bid, they didn't even bother bidding in some cases.

They "competed" for the Switch contract because they had a warehouse of SoCs that were made for an era of gaming phablet that never happened and selling them at cost to Nintendo was the best they could do.

You know how they chose to compete? They bought Mellanox, a smaller but extremely competitive company in the high bandwidth interconnect market.... which after the Nvidia acquisition, Nvidia dropped the Mellanox name (maybe the most valuable thing in the entire acquisition!)

I'm straight up glad I don't own Nvidia stock. I'd have an ulcer if I did.

I'm not saying AMD is magically better here, AMD has all of their corporate and technological warts too... but at least they show up and do the job. Nvidia doesn't even show up.


Why is Nvidia obligated to compete in those arenas? They reserve every right to turn down contracts they don't want. You can't blame Nvidia for products they never released.

Plus, all of the situations you listed make sense:

- Nvidia didn't have their own x86 core design, so there's no reason to bid on Sony/Microsoft contracts against AMD.

- Until recently, Nvidia didn't have a complete system capable of scaling into the Top500 list.

- The Switch made sense as it was a mobile device, and Nvidia had been deploying ARM SOCs for almost a decade.

> You know how they chose to compete? They bought Mellanox

...and used their technology to replace the outdated NVlink bridge on their datacenter products? The value of that acquisition was in the networking technology, Nvidia spends more on securing TSMC contracts than they did buying Mellanox. It was means to an end for them, and nothing really backfired.

It's dumbfounding how people are foaming at the mouth over Nvidia right now. They've published more AI papers than Microsoft and Apple combined, yet everyone pretends like it's dumb luck that they're the platform-of-choice. Nvidia has a lot of places where they could improve, but I don't think you listed any of them.


Nvidia is one of the few companies that were not Intel or AMD to ever ship an x86 core. They used this to great effect in their GPUs as their command processor, they would offload parts of the driver binary into the GPU and execute locally for job setup; they later became an ARM licensee and changed that core out for an ARM one.

Their hybrid CPU+GPU design they're trying to sell to customers (Ada Lovelace) is their full sized ARM core (a Tegra descendant) plugged into where the tiny ARM core (to be the command processor) goes. This is also how the Tegra X1 work; in a lot of ways, Ada Lovelace is just a really really big Nintendo Switch SoC, and not too dissimilar to how PASemi designed the M series SoCs, its a very common way to keep designs from ballooning silicon and power requirements in embedded land.

Also, I'm not saying Nvidia's Mellanox acquisition was dumb; it was very smart. They bought the company that helped make AMD a household name in the supercomputer world: AMD famously used semi-stock Mellanox IB NICs, with custom firmwares, as their external facing hypertransport links combined with Mellanox IB switches; nothing else made could handle RDMA traffic as low latency AND has high bandwidth they needed, while also being flexible enough to be able to natively speak HTX directly on the bus. AMD had proven over a decade earlier that Mellanox knows how to be part of this.

Nvidia could have used Mellanox parts at any point, btw. They just chose not to compete.


> Nvidia is one of the few companies that were not Intel or AMD to ever ship an x86 core

You are talking about embedded 32-bit microcontrollers. By your logic, Rockchip, Motorola and Texas Instruments should have also been bidding on Sony and Microsoft's contracts. I don't think this even warrants a response.

> Nvidia could have used Mellanox parts at any point, btw. They just chose not to compete.

They certainly showed up to compete. You might not think their moves are fair or friendly, but that's how things go in love and war. Don't hate the player, hate the game.


I wish I was as unsuccessful as Nvidia.


Published by "strategy" consultant with no cited sources. Naa.


Some are listed here: https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1701644142739349898

I haven't watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5xY_kRKHxE but perhaps someone will be interested enough to.



A lot of modern software management is utter BS with ceremonies and processes, all filled with BS work for optics and politics.

The old-school SV management style of actually being a leader is lost these days.


You're wrong. Not a single piece of working software (literally zero) was shipped before Agile was invented 15 years ago.


> You're wrong. Not a single piece of working software (literally zero) was shipped before Agile was invented 15 years ago.

You're wrong. Not a single piece of working software (literally zero) was shipped before a combination of Leetcode + agile + performance reviews + feature factory culture + microservices was invented in the last decade.


Don't blame systems for ineffective leaders. Those leaders would be ineffective under any system.


1:1s are mostly a fad, people refusing to go with the team and thinking that they're special and that they need personal counselling and growth-ing and all that bs.

It's simple, you're either part of the group or you're not, there's no "I" in group. I don't see past great leaders (military and not only) doing 1:1s with the members of their groups.


I suspect that it was routine for "past great leaders" to have 1:1s, which only means to have opportunities to speak face to face in private with direct reports.

The modern 'open space' office makes it impossible because it is effectively a panopticon where everyone is in full view and hearing distance of others all the time so effort has to be made to schedule 1:1s and that may seem forced and contrived.

When one had to go to their manager's private office to report of discuss something it was easier to exchange in confidence without any specific planning.

My personal experience is that 1:1s are very useful not just as an opportunity to raise and discuss concerns but to create rapport and talk shop openly and informally.


1:1 feel like an unhealthy commingling of management with mentorship. Better the two are distinct.

You have a relationship with your manager.

You have an optional relationship with a mentor.

There's no reason for both to be the same person. In all probability, your manager might not even have the skills to be a good mentor.

And they certainly don't have aligned incentives while also people-managing you.


You can have a regular 1:1 with your mentor, even if that person isn't your manager. I have a regular 1:1 with a developer who will eventually take over some of my responsibilities, but he doesn't formally report to me.


There's probably truth in that. If I think back, I'd have 1:1 talks with managers all the time in prior lives but I'm not sure I ever had standing 1:1s. Even at my current company, we often theoretically had regular 1:1s but with travel and other schedules they could end up being every month or two.


The only way I've found to have effective 1:1s is to come armed with pointed questions about how things are going, and to actually be aware of what your reports are working on and who they're working with enough to know what questions to ask. They don't work if you're passive. You can surface a lot of vague feelings of unease or satisfaction with initial questions that you can turn into in-depth conversations, and those usually tell you what the person's preferences and areas of growth are.

I think no matter what structure you put in place as a manager you still have to get to know your reports well enough to know what you can and can't confidently ask them to do.


Completely disagree. Some folks are brilliant but aren’t going to function well in group settings all of the time. You still need to find a way to listen to what they have to say, and 1x1s accomplish that for many people. Otherwise, group dynamics can just bias toward the loudest or most outgoing.

Not to mention, you also get to just talk nonsense and get to know each other as humans a bit. Some folks enjoy that, me included.


They also find people who don't work out, since folks might be hesitant calling out under performers in a group setting (or frankly putting those thoughts in a discoverable chat app even in DMs)


Any evidence for them being a fad? I definitely remember my parents' generation having dedicated one-on-one meetings with their managers on a regular basis, regardless of what field they were working in (skilled labourers, but none of them in tech).


The first 15 years of my career, up until roughly 2010, I had no regular 1:1's in tech. Managers were generally more technical also (they would do non-critical path dev work.) Today there is more separation between "people management" and "technical management." Usually one or the other suffers.


Any team and organization does 1:1s in some ways regardless of how formal they are and regardless of those being scheduled on your outlook calendar.

Even a chat exchange of ideas or mails qualify as a 1:1.


I probably never had scheduled 1:1s with my manager prior to my current job (and it's been hit or miss when I was traveling a lot) aside from specific events like maybe performance reviews. But had lots of in-person conversations, many with open doors, some not.


>I don't see past great leaders (military and not only) doing 1:1s with the members of their groups.

You don't think Titus Labienus discussed anything one on one with Julius Caesar? That just sounds like insanity.

I want 1:1s, it's the best way that I can make my boss work for me. That stuff gets me raises and promotions.


I don’t see talking eye to eye to your second in command or to one of your trustful advisors as a 1:1. Of course that the first kind of discussion is quite old, today’s 1:1s are a different thing, at least when it comes to they’re seen in the corporate and tech world.

And back to your question, no, I don’t think that Zhukov or Napoleon had 1:1s with their second people in command, I don’t think they were laying down advancement opportunities nore were those people asked about how do they feel and what’s troubling them about the team (the army in this case).


How do you deal with people who don't or barely talk in group settings? Is this just a no-go and they're out?


I agree in principal, but in practice stroking people’s egos with personal attention works wonders!


I found 1:1s profoundly helpful as a manager. You get insight into the team and business that you don’t get in day to day meetings.

Notably, when you have trust, your reports will tell you what’s actually wrong.




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