Most do it once or twice in their life for a couple years and come back to normal relaxed day job (although some are absolute champions and will tough it out long term).

I've always figured a job like this at Nvidia would be the equivalent of "I'm going to go up north for a while and come back".

> The meetings would be characterized by shouting and fighting, but employees put up with it because of the “golden handcuffs,” according to the ex-staffer.

Hopefully, the shouting and fighting was at least motivated by drive for the company to succeed.

There are dysfunctional places where people don't care.

There are dysfunctional places where people battle for individual advancement.

There are dysfunctional places where see their job as only doing what they're told, and, culturally, anything else (e.g., questioning, taking initiative) as improper.

But if you have a place where everyone is focused on the company succeeding, and the 'only' apparent barrier is that they're not collaborating very well (e.g., not communicating or managing information well, or a brawler is steamrolling over better ideas), that might be a relatively easy dysfunction to improve. You could start by observing a single concrete meeting that's unproductive and/or fighting, figure out the effects and why, and go from there.

> The meetings would be characterized by shouting and fighting, but employees put up with it because of the “golden handcuffs,” according to the ex-staffer.

I feel like the more important question is not the hours worked but whether these meetings useful and constructive? If not, maybe these employees could provide more value to the company and have a better work/life balance? My understanding is that generally places (including not just companies, but countries) where the expected hours are really long, much of that time spent is not productive.

Ok, so it is not real work. Of course you can attend fake meetings for 16h per day, but you cannot focus on actual development for that long.

(Unless you work on a solo project that really interests you or have significant code ownership within the company.)

1. They're afraid of getting fired before they can cash in;

2. The company knows this so can get more "free" work out of those employees without any really direct threat. All it takes is minor tweaks to how performance reviews work and having a quota for subpar ratings; and

3. In 2 years when those gains are all paid out, a ton of people will leave and those that stay will have absolutely no fear and no motivation to do extra unpaid work because they're independently wealthy.

This pattern has played out in many tech companies. Some companies (eg Zynga) went so far as to go to employees and tell them "I'm going to fire you if you don't agree to reduce your stock compensation" [1]. In addition to being scummy, it's kinda funny considering where Zynga has ended up.

[1]: https://archive.is/5Py2R

Did a quick google and found examples such as this: https://www.comparably.com/companies/nvidia/work-life-balanc...

Doesn't look that bad from an "Asian work culture" perspective.

Is Nvidia more functionally organized or BU organized. From your experience, are functionally organized highly performing companies' meetings generally more passionate, while BU organized highly performing companies' meetings generally more political?