Nvidia senior engineer explains why many employees don't talk about their equity

Yahoo

19-03-2025

Justin Fung, a senior engineer at Nvidia, says employees don't talk about their equity's worth.
He said in an interview with "Codesmith" that Nvidia is largely made up of long-time staffers.
Fung said he landed his own role by developing a niche set of skills.
Nvidia is still staffed largely by the "old guard" — and they're not paying much attention to the company's recent rise to popularity.
So says Justin Fung, a senior engineer at the company, who doesn't believe external interest is having much of an effect on Nvidia's culture.
"People don't really talk about how much their equity is worth, because they were never really there for the equity," Fung said in an interview with the "Codesmith" podcast. "They really just liked what they were doing."
Nvidia has gained fame as one of the leading companies driving the AI boom, but before that, despite enjoying relatively consistent success in the GPU space, it wasn't a household name.
"It's a really interesting company because it only became famous in the last five years," Fung said. The initial broader spark of interest from the outside world, he added, came thanks to the gold rush on crypto.
"People realized that you could mine Bitcoin using these computers," he said. "So, that was the first step into the public consciousness — and then the next big one was obviously AI. People figured out that you could run these neural networks on these GPUs, and that sent it to the stratosphere."
With its explosion in popularity has come a corresponding spike in employee compensation — with Nvidia's median salary surpassing $220,000 as of 2024. For Fung, having a role at Nvidia represented a turnaround in his finances.
"Everybody knows the equity, the stock has risen exponentially over the last couple of years," Fung said. "I'm in a very comfortable place compared to where I used to be."
Fung said Nvidia doesn't have high turnover, so many of his coworkers are holdovers from when the company was primarily associated with the gaming industry. They're lifers who joined — and stayed — largely thanks to their passion for the work.
"A lot of people have been working there before this company was famous, and they'd make gaming rigs," Fung said. "A lot of people that come from that era are very humble, just from a previous generation of technology."
In fact, unless it's intern season, Fung said younger employees are a relatively rare sight.
"Everybody's super nice and I love all my co-workers, but I don't think the turnover is as high, so you don't see a lot of younger millennials or Gen Z people there," he said.
Unlike many of its peers in the tech field, Fung said Nvidia never really developed a "startup" culture. Instead, he added, CEO Jensen Huang's vision for the company has remained relatively consistent since its inception.
"Nvidia, despite being as popular as it was, never really had the culture of being a startup — say Airbnb or Snapchat — where there's a lot of young people having fun and doing work at the same time," Fung said."
And unlike other big names in tech like Google or Facebook, Nvidia isn't in the business of hiring "generalists" and plugging them in wherever they fit, Fung said. Instead, they're often looking for people with hyper-specific skillsets.
"I really only got the position though, because my alignment, my background, was like perfectly aligned with the role," Fung said. And I have seen a lot of people apply to Nvidia who were not as lucky."
Nvidia didn't respond to a request for comment by Business Insider prior to publication.
Read the original article on Business Insider