Nvidia doesn’t need a big cultural shift to get workers to be hardcore. They’ve been there for years.
Companies like Shopify, Microsoft, and Meta are ramping up the intensity for workers, pushing the need to get ahead in AI and drive efficiency. The shift inside tech companies has led to cullings of so-called “low performers”, inflexible return-to-office mandates, and a reduction in perks.
Nvidia’s staff has grown immensely in the last few years, and market capitalization is on a wild roller coaster ride, but the tentpoles of the company’s culture go back much farther than the AI boom. The company, and Huang himself, are also the subject of two new books, released in the last four months, which corroborate what former Nvidians have told Business Insider.
Nvidia has a demanding work culture that trickles down from its famous CEO, Jensen Huang, providing a foil for the tech firms that aspire to be hardcore, but do so by fiat.
“Basically, every single person in Nvidia is directly accountable to Jensen,” said Stephen Witt, author of “The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip.”
Nvidia declined to comment on this report.
‘The mission is the boss.’
Nvidia has an extremely horizontal structure, with dozens of people — around 60 — reporting directly to CEO Jensen Huang.
Huang sets the direction and the goal, but the Santa Clara, California-based company also has a defining mantra: “The mission is the boss,” author Tae Kim wrote in his book “The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant.”
Nvidia shies away from short-term goals, Kim said. There is a central goal or mission, but planning and strategizing are constant processes that don’t focus on management incentives or satisfying a hierarchy.
Project leaders may suddenly find themselves reporting directly to Huang. These newly anointed direct reports are dubbed “pilots in charge” and are subject to his wrath and carry his weight, Kim said.
According to a former Nvidia employee who asked to remain anonymous to discuss internal matters, everyone in the company must be prepared to answer Huang in detail.
“His ability to track small details across countless projects is incredible,” a former director told BI.
This method of extreme accountability means Nvidia hasn’t had to rein in employees as many other companies have post-pandemic. Nvidia is still remote-friendly, for example. But meetings are far from relaxing.
Huang is known to publicly discuss failures and disagreements to benefit the group rather than spare feelings. If he suspects someone isn’t on top of their work, a public, cross-examination may ensue. Perks are few, but that’s always been the case, two former Nvidians told BI.
The “mission is boss” ethos helps Nvidia avoid the pitfalls of large firms, which often struggle to make quick decisions, let alone pivot when needed, Kim wrote.
“Jensen really doesn’t tolerate bullshit,” a former engineer from Nvidia’s early days told BI. This intolerance makes playing politics nearly impossible, they said.
“It’s not just, ‘You did something wrong.’ It’s, ‘You did something wrong that was self-serving’ — that’s the typical problem in big companies,” they said.
The philosophy is that the mission can change, but as long as everyone serves it rather than their manager, the company should thrive. Nvidia’s pivot to focus on machine learning was even communicated in a companywide Friday-night email in 2014. By Monday, Nvidia was an AI company, Witt wrote.
Email accountability
Huang is known to send more than 100 emails a day, which brings another Jensen-ism into play. (Kim’s book has an entire appendix of “Jensen-isms”)
The 62-year-old CEO often refers to Nvidia’s modus operandi as “speed of light.” That’s how fast Huang wants everything at Nvidia to progress. He’s publicly used the phrase to refer to everything from hiring processes to fixing technical problems.
Witt thinks that Nvidia’s email culture was possibly an inspiration for a memorable moment from the early days of DOGE. On a Saturday, Elon Musk requested that every federal government employee send a five-point email recounting what they had done that week. Jensen Huang has requested these emails from his staff since 2020.
According to Kim, at least 100 of Huang’s daily diet of emails are “top five” emails.
‘Nowhere to hide’
The irony in Nvidia’s position among the Silicon Valley elite is that the “mission is boss” mentality and the constant email status updates mean a lot of Nvidians have flexibility that most of Big Tech, including Nvidia’s largest customers, have abandoned in 2025.
The hours can be long at Nvidia, which also stems from Huang. Sixty-hour weeks are the norm, and 80-hour weeks are likely at crucial times, offering contrast to companies that feel the need to delineate exact office hours.
“I don’t even know when Jensen sleeps,” another former Nvidia director said.
Many Nvidians are still able to work from wherever they like. The reason is two-fold, Witt said.
“One of the reasons he’s so big on work-from-home is because it gives women, and especially young mothers, the opportunity to continue their work without their careers getting interrupted,” Witt said.
Inspired by his wife, Lori Huang, a brilliant electrical engineer who dropped out of the workforce after becoming a mother of two, Huang is aware that some valuable engineering brains find balancing work and family difficult.
“It works really well at Nvidia,” Witt said. “You know if you’re dropping the ball at Nvidia, the spotlight is turning directly at you, more or less instantly. There is nowhere to hide if you are shirking your work at Nvidia, and I think that makes work-from-home work better for them.”
Nvidia for life
If there’s one hallmark of the new era of hardcore tech culture, it’s layoffs. Rolling layoffs are constantly whirring in the background of tech workplaces in 2025.
That’s where Nvidia fully diverges from the pack.
The company hasn’t had layoffs since 2008, and despite the hard-charging atmosphere rife with accountability, the turnover at the company is minuscule — under 5% annually for the past two years.
Witt said that’s in part due to a self-selection dynamic. Engineers who like a no-nonsense atmosphere where technological supremacy is the focus naturally gravitate toward the company.
“He can get these guys to work for Nvidia on little more than a dream, but those guys will do it because they know the circuits, they know the technology. And they know that Jensen’s always at the cutting edge, even if it’s not making money. They’ll do anything to be at the cutting edge,” Witt told BI.
But another reason many Nvidians spend decades with the company could come from Huang’s competitive anxiety.
“When Nvidia is evaluating an engineer, they won’t think just about what they’re worth. They’ll think about what it’s worth to keep that person away from the competition,” Witt said.
Huang, though, has offered a different explanation.
“I don’t like giving up on people because I think that they could improve,” Huang said at a Stripe event last year. “It’s kind of tongue in cheek, but people know that I’d rather torture them into greatness.”
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