It’s been a very good year for tech pros who work at Nvidia: thanks to the chip giant’s skyrocketing stock price, many of them are becoming very, very rich.
During a recent all-hands meeting, Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang addressed the question of employees made ultra-wealthy thanks to stock grants, according to Business Insider. Some of these employees had shifted to “semi-retirement” mode, which sounds like a variation on Silicon Valley’s infamous “rest and vest.”
For his part, Huang told employees that they should manage their time responsibly. The rest of the article is a fascinating glimpse of Nvidia’s corporate culture, which includes all-remote work and unlimited PTO; the attrition rate, as you might expect, is notably low, and headcount is expanding. So long as Nvidia’s GPU chips are a highly desirable component in generative A.I. development, the revenues will continue to pour in.
According to levels.fyi, which crowdsources compensation data, entry-level hardware engineers can earn a $135,000 base salary and $15,000 in stock options; entry-level software engineers can make $144,000 base and $25,000 in stock. Those numbers increase with experience and tenure, of course, with senior tech pros making six figures in stock options alone—and that’s before you factor in the skyrocketing share price.
In some ways, the situation is reminiscent of Alphabet (the parent company of Google) and its effort to develop self-driving cars. In its zeal to “win” the autonomous driving race, the search engine giant paid some software engineers enough in cash and stock for them to walk right out the door into retirement. It’s sometimes hard to keep an employee in their seat once they’ve become a millionaire.
For tech pros everywhere, the situation at Nvidia underscores the importance of stock options as a benefit (if available). Especially for more senior tech pros, stock can constitute a sizable portion of overall compensation; even better, companies are often willing to negotiate over stock, because they see it as a way to retain employees via a vesting schedule.
