- Bryce Adelstein Lelbach, a principal architect at Nvidia, discussed the company’s culture in a recent podcast interview.
- He described it as “organized chaos” and said it best fits self-starters with lots of initiative.
- Lelbach said that the kind of flexibility Nvidia’s culture has afforded him is “really valuable.”
If you’re highly driven and independently motivated, you might be a culture fit for Nvidia.
“I sometimes describe it as, it’s a little bit of, you know, organized chaos, which I really like,” Nvidia’s principal architect Bryce Adelstein Lelbach said in a recent podcast interview with TechBytes.
Nvidia has rapidly gained a reputation as one of the companies at the forefront of the AI revolution, and positions at the company are highly coveted — both for the associated prestige and potential financial upside.
Those who do make the cut should brace themselves — as Lelbach says Nvidia assigns new hires real responsibility from day one. He added that it could feel, to some, like being thrown into the deep end.
“I think that for some people it could be quite scary if, you know, you start day one at Nvidia and usually it’s like, ‘Okay, here’s a laptop and like here’s a pile of bugs that you’re responsible for. Good luck,'” Lelbach said.
Still, he added, things are likely to work out well for those who are used to being self-sufficient.
“There’s not necessarily like a lot of structured onboarding. It sort of depends, team by team,” Lelbach said. “But if you’re a self-starter, if you’ve got a lot of initiative, it’s a great environment for you.”
Lelbach says Nvidia has a relatively “flat management structure” — meaning that the company has fewer layers of management separating executives from employees. CEO Jensen Huang has previously said he manages about 50 to 60 direct reports himself.
“I really love the Nvidia culture because Nvidia does not have a lot of strict hierarchy or rules. It’s very free-form, very flexible,” Lelbach said.
The Nvidia technical leader said employees aren’t likely to be told “no” based solely on whether or not they’re staying in their proverbial lanes.
“They’re not going to be like, ‘Oh you can’t do that because like that’s not your job title,'” Lelbach said. “You’re not going to hear that.”
Reviews on the company’s Glassdoor page appear to largely reflect Lelbach’s lived experience, with 96% of posters saying they’d recommend working at the company to a friend. One user listed a “pro” of working at Nvidia as its “unique and empowering culture,” while another said a “con” was the environment could prove “a bit fast-paced and too competitive.”
Nvidia employees have described CEO Huang’s leadership style to Business Insider as a “relentless pursuit of perfection.”
When presented with employee accounts calling him “demanding,” a “perfectionist,” and “not easy to work for” during a “60 Minutes” interview, Huang said those descriptions fit him “perfectly.”
“It should be like that,” the Nvidia CEO said. “If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy.”
For Lelbach, the kind of autonomy that Nvidia affords its employees is a key draw.
“That sort of — that freedom and that flexibility is really valuable to me,” he said. “It really works well for my personality type.”
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