"…For Nvidia, after this latest run-up took it north of the $3T milestone, the company is being valued at more than $100M for each of its 29,600 employees (per its filing that counted up to the end of Jan 2024).
That’s more than 5x any of its big tech peers, and hundreds of times higher than more labor-intensive companies like Walmart and Amazon. It is worth noting that Nvidia has very likely done some hiring since the end of January — I think the company might be in growth mode — but even if the HR department has been working non-stop, Nvidia will still be a major outlier on this simple measure.
We are running out of ways to describe Nvidia’s recent run… but a nine-figure valuation per employee is a new one."
-
“Are the employees gonna see a cent of this?”
-
“Fuck, no!”
Well, they technically will see SOME cents of this because I’m pretty sure Nvidia gives employees stocks too.
But yeah, I also posted this because it’s a clear illustration of how most salaries will never reflect the value your labour brings to an organization.
I don’t think many people would claim overall valuation has much of anything to do with the value labor brings to an organization.
In this case I think all it indicates is just how much the company’s stock price is driven by speculation about possible demand for generative AI, and even then I’m not sure that current price per share times number of shares divided by number of employees is a clear indication of that.
I don’t think many people would claim overall valuation has much of anything to do with the value labor brings to an organization.
Apologies, can you clarify what exactly you mean by this? Because when I say their labour is not being valued, I do extend that to the Wall Street orgs that are doing the evaluations. They look at the “product” on offer, not the people actually working and developing it.
Are you saying because stock prices aren’t steady, we can’t correlate that to salaries?
I’ll just leave this here.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nvidia-employees-rich-happy-problem-insiders-say-2023-12
Brilliant, thanks for this!
I said in a comment on mastodon that I don’t think the batch of newer employees hired at Nvidia are going to have anywhere near the same compensation as the current employees do, and this kind of helps support my suspicions…
Which could lead to a morale problem in the company too (speaking from experience)
I just responded to someone else in another comment chain, but I agree. As I said there, the more tenured employees checking out can really block anyone new from gaining the long-term institutional knowledge they need to be successful, which either leads to high new worker turnover or an implosion when the last of the long term “old breed” retire.
That is the most… American thing I read in months. Workers complaining about half decent work conditions. As a European, being harder to get hired than to get fired was always a given to me, and I believe that’s a good thing.
That’s Business Insider being Business Insider, yeah.
I’m super confused by this verbiage. If it’s harder for a worker to get hired than fired, doesn’t that mean that it’s relatively easier to get fired? Which is nit how it should be right?
Based on the article context, shouldn’t the worker quoted in the article be saying “It’s very hard to get hired here, and getting fired is even fucking harder!”?
Anyway I agree that it should not be easy for a company to fire workers. I think that knowing this, companies should try to ensure they’re onboarding quality workers in the first place, which would probably involve a difficult hiring process.
My read on the article isn’t that workers are complaining about “half decent work conditions”, but that workers are complaining about completely checked out coworkers. If you’re a new, junior level worker and both your manager and your Intermediate and Senior level coworkers have completely checked out, you’re probably not getting the performance feedback, mentorship, or over the shoulder exposure to techniques and procedures that are invaluable at that stage in your career.
I’m definitely reading between the lines, but I’m seeing an article where less tenured employees are complaining about that culture shift, and BI is putting their “happy, well-compensated employees bad” corporate bootlicker spin on it.
Thanks, I should have done that and forgot. I was typing up what I remembered from the article, then realized I’d prolly fuck up a significant portion of the relevant facts so I just deleted it all and searched for the article.
I have noticed that archive.is (and another tld I don’t remember right now, .ph?) links don’t want to load on my internal network that uses a pihole for dns and drops anything else dns related going out on the wan port of the router. Probably need to look in to that bc it’s getting annoying.
Damn, those employees can buy they own yachts! Must be nice!
/s
kagis
They probably aren’t hurting.
Aside from any other forms of stock-based compensation or bonuses – which they probably aren’t gonna publish – looks like they’ve got an employee stock purchase plan.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/benefits/money/espp/
Enroll in our current ESPP offering during the month you’re hired or during an official enrollment period, which occurs in February or August. Elect to contribute from 1-15 percent of your salary through payroll deductions.
Your offering price for NVIDIA ESPP gets set the first trading day after the month you’ve enrolled, and it remains the look-back price for up to 24 months.
During these two years, there will be four purchase periods. Your contributions over each period will purchase our shares at a 15 percent discount.
The company’s worth something like 200 times what it was in 2015.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/nvidia/salaries/software-engineer
Software Engineer compensation in United States at Nvidia ranges from $178K per year for IC1 to $542K per year for IC6.
If someone’s been maxing their ESPP out, just from that alone, they’re probably doing pretty well. You convert 15% of your salary into stock, and that 15% of your income from 2015 alone is worth ten years of income down the road, over a million.
I can’t imagine most Nvidia employees don’t make enough to become millionaires within like 5-10 years if they aren’t already. Their entry-level software engineering positions have a base pay of $147K and total compensation of $180K. The lowest paying level of senior engineers gets more like $300K… Even the ones who leave before then are highly likely to get a job with comparable pay or benefits considering they have Nvidia on their resumé.
Now, tens-of-millions-aires, I don’t think most employees get there.
= AI bubble
This is definitely realistic and not an over valuation based on AI-hype investor brain rot. Like, they’re a fucking graphics card company. Like, sure graphics cards can do some cool linear algebra, and linear algebra can do some cool things… but I’m sorry, they’re not going to be earning as much as Apple or Microsoft, companies that sell the whole rest of the computer to people and/or the plurality of software that runs on it.
Technically, they don’t even make the actual graphics cards, they just design them and then outsource manufacturing to TSMC.
But don’t you know that doesn’t matter, because by 2028 every singe company in the world is going to need a data center filled with tens of thousands of AI accelerators turning their own scrape of the internet into a chatbot, and so one of the companies that makes thouse accelerators is definitely going to have as much business as companies that make half of everyone’s phones or computer software./s
