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http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/interviews/2010/06/11/how-i-got-my-job-at-nvidia/1
How I Got My Job at NvidiaPublished on 11th June 2010 by Clive Webster 1 - What do you at Nvidia, Lars? 2 - How are Graphics Drivers Developed? 3 - How to Hunt Bugs, and Will Nvidia be at a UK Games Event? 4 - Do You Need a Qualification to Work in Tech? 5 - Advice For Trying to Get a Job in IT or Nvidia 2 Comments
How I Got My Job At... Nvidia, with Lars NordskogA while back we were invited to meet some of Nvidia’s unsung heroes while it talked about its Fermi GPU. And by ‘meet’ we of course mean, ‘get drunk with’. In a weird circular bar in the middle of a Las Vegas casino, we chatted to Lars Nordskog and, between bar-top dancing sessions (the staff, not us), found out about what he does in Nvidia’s secretive Developer Relations department.
If you’re looking for advice on a change in career, or just want to see what goes on behind that big The Way It’s Meant To Be Played splash screen, read on!
Q: Hi Lars, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. What do you do at Nvidia at the moment?
Hey Clive, thanks for the opportunity to chat with you and your community. Right now, my job title is Developer Technology Testing Engineer, though it’s not a completely self-explanatory title! The primary purpose that my colleagues and I serve is to make game experiences kick ass on NvidiPro-Aducts. Of course we try our best to do this through the enhancement of games with technologies like PhysX and CUDA, but there's also an entire side to the equation which doesn’t always get a ton of exposure… The way we work with developers to ensure the best possible experience with regard to performance and compatibility.
Q How long have you been at Nvidia?
Well, that all depends on when you start counting! I started out as a contractor for Nvidia doing part-time work just over four years ago, but I was brought in as a full employee in a new role at the company just over two years ago.
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The devilishly handsome Lars Nordskog, of Nvidia Dev Rel and this article fame
Q: Your path to your current role hasn't been too conventional, we hear - when did you first have contact with Nvidia and why?
Yes you’re correct… In order to remember how long I’ve been here, I literally had to go back and look at whenBattlefield 2 came out, as it was instrumental in my coming to work for Nvidia, oddly enough! Back at the end of 2005 I was attending community college in hopes of transferring to another school when done with the first two years. I had been working at - of all things - a motorcycle shop for eight years, but in my spare time I was heavily into gaming and PCs, of course.
At the time, the latest game I was into pretty seriously was Battlefield 2. I was a fairly hardcore BF2 player; I was active on a bunch of gaming/hardware forums and rented a dedicated BF2 server with friends too. In the BF2community there was a site dedicated to providing community volunteer admins for the official BF2 servers, which I became involved with for many months. Eventually the site owners contacted me and said, ‘We’ve been introduced to some contacts at Nvidia and they have some dedicated servers which they’d like administrated. You live the closest to the Nvidia headquarters, and you know about the admin software, so we need you to go up there and maintain their BF2 servers on our behalf.’
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Lars' desk at Nvidia HQ - the Nerf gun is for preotection! Click to enlarge.
As you can imagine, I was a bit unclear as to whether this was some kind of hoax at first, but I drove down to Santa Clara and sure enough, I got signed up as a part-time contractor. By day I went to school and worked at the motorcycle shop, and by night I maintained the 30+ game servers for Nvidia in it headquarters datacenter: odd, no? Additionally, I volunteered my efforts to Nvidia at trade shows like E3 and Quakecon, while gaming with some Nvidia employees in my spare time (yup, more BF2).
About a year later, I was invited to come work for Nvidia as a full-time contractor, working with pre-release content as a Builds Manager, securing and maintaining pre-release game builds. After doing this for about six months, there was a re-organization within the company, and I was unfortunately let go as part of that, as the role was being done away with. I was very disappointed after having left a job of eight years to work for Nvidia, but I sent out some emails to people I worked pretty closely with in the company to say thanks for the chance to work with them.
How are Graphics Drivers Developed?
Q: Did anything happen from those emails?
Fortunately, the Developer Technology group (a group in the company that I had worked side-by-side with through this six-month period) saw the opportunity for me to take on a role they had available, and that’s where I’ve been ever since, now as a full-time employee working with some of the most talented people I’ve ever met.
The Developer Technology group is extremely diverse, given that we have my admittedly odd background alongside people who have worked in graphics for years, people who have worked at game development studios, and people who have worked in academia and research roles in the past. Overall though, now I’m working with developers, maintaining a development and testing environment for our group, and running some demos at events we’ve had or attended.
Q: Could you go into more detail about what you do, what kinds of things you’re responsible for and who you get to talk to, both internally and externally?
The majority of my days are spent working with developers (from smaller 1-2 person studios all the way up to 400+ person studios) to help them fix problems they’re having during the development cycle, or after their game’s release. This includes reproducing any performance issues, corruption issues, or driver crashes that they or their users may be seeing.
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One of the test stations at Nvidia HQ, used for replicating and identifying bugs in games and ForceWare drivers. Click to enlarge.
We also learn a lot from the developers about how they want the technologies to work, and look for opportunities to streamline this for them going forward. That’s crucial feedback. I can recall occasions where a developer has come to us and said, ‘I want to do X with my engine, which hasn’t really been done before, but the driver has a fundamental behavior that is preventing me from doing it. Plz4toFixIt!!!’
Q: What do you guys do when presented with this issue?
Often the existing driver behavior might be based on the needs of the status quo, or maybe no other games or engines have ever required this functionality before. But we’ll look into it and usually it’s a totally creative and valid use case, so we work with the software team to get it working the way it should to enable these developers. Because of this interaction, the driver team has been known to re-write large portions of the driver as a result of something like this (which is obviously no trivial task: sometimes it’s a couple of days, and sometimes it’s literally weeks’ worth of work).
This really makes the driver into somewhat of a collaborative project, and I personally find that pretty cool. We can’t (and don’t pretend to) know all the ways our products and our driver will be used until developers get creative and find bad-ass stuff to do with their games and engines.
Q: Does that mean you need to talk to all sorts of people to see if the suggestions for driver updates are worth pursuing?
I work very closely with many teams inside the software group, the driver release team, and our performance and QA testing teams to get fixes for any issues as well as some feature enhancements. As we fix issues, we usually send developers a driver with the fix or features they’ve been requesting.
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Nvidia's Global HQ is based in Santa Clara in the USA, but it has offices all over the world. Click to enlarge.
When working with developers, a lot of times they want to know things like how to optimally implement the latest and greatest lighting or shadow effects, how to make better use of the hardware’s resources, or why they’re brushing up against certain system limitations, and we provide whatever technical information and recommendations we can to support them.
The way I look at it is that this type of work is the critical foundation of our The Way It’s Meant To Be Played program. It does no good to partner with a developer to add a bunch of cool features or effects to a game through our technology and research if you’re getting a crash every ten minutes of play, or you have some odd corruption on screen all the time. Basics first. This approach we take to the process has been instrumental to our ability to offer some pretty solid and feature-rich drivers.
How to Hunt Bugs
Q: How do you hunt out and verify bugs so that you can eliminate them?
We really do see all kinds of things come up, and we know that if an issue affects even just one or two people in a studio, it’s bound to be affecting someone else out there, so we try to rope in every possible issue we have a reproduction case for and drive it through to a fix as soon as possible. It genuinely bothers me to know that issues exist, so I file bugs against everything I find and try to find a solution for developers anywhere possible.
In the past, if we can’t reproduce Pro-Ablem in-house, I’ve even driven over to local developers offices and grabbed a machine that shows some issue that we need to get to the bottom of. Some might call it an obsession!
I’m a gamer myself, so I’ll sometimes stop in the middle of a 2am gaming session (currently I’m playing a lot ofModern Warfare 2) and file bugs, enhancement requests, or shoot off an email to someone in the company, asking, ‘Is this an issue we know about?’ Like anybody else, I want a perfect product in my home rig. I think genuinely caring about the experience is important, and it can’t be just viewed as a chore, otherwise you’ll never do it well enough.
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More testing and development stations at Nvidia HQ. They look suspiciously clean to us - did someone tidy up before taking this shot? Click to enlarge.
I’m also guilty of scouring forums (they provide us valuable feedback) on the hunt for multiple confirmations of issues, creating a list of problems with our driver releases, and sending it to our QA and driver release teams. We then try to go through and compare against bugs we know about, and file and reproduce the ones we don’t. It doesn’t do any good to say that everything’s perfect all the time if that keeps people from being driven towards perfecting the product. You need to be honest with yourself and colleagues.
Everyone I work with approaches this with a similar mindset. I really enjoy and appreciate that, and their tireless efforts make all this work we do possible. At the end of the day, we desperately want to build cool stuff and do the right thing to make games run better, look better, and play better.
Q: You seem to be involved in events a lot - is there any chance we’ll see an Nvidia games-related event in the UK any time soon?
These days I haven’t been to as many events, but I am typically asked to go to events based on whether my presence is useful or not. I’m not aware of any events in the UK but I’d also say that anything’s possible... We certainly haven’t ruled it out.
[Nvidia spokesperson Ben Berraondo later said, ‘Regarding NVIDIA games-related events in the UK – it’s looking very likely you’ll be able to find us at the Eurogamer Expo 2010.’]
Do You Need a Qualification to Work in Tech?
Q: Knowing what you know now, if you could give yourself some advice when you were starting out in your career, what would that be?
Well to be fair, I haven’t exactly been at it all that long! Compared to a lot of people I’m still a bit of a n00b here.
Q: Are professional courses (eg degrees in IT, game design, Microsoft qualifications) worthwhile, or are experience and contacts more important?
I think courses and certifications are absolutely still worthwhile, I don’t want to give the wrong impression here. Just to emphasize this, I’m still taking classes on the side, while working at Nvidia. But it’s also necessary to acknowledge that courses can’t teach you everything that a given company might value. In fact, it can be funny to sit in technology-orientated classes with curriculums which might be a bit dated when viewed in the context of the processes and technology I see at work every day. I think that’s pretty cool.
Over the years technology has changed so much, and I don’t think anyone should assume that certifications guarantee success. As you know, in our industry we’ve seen ideas and technologies that have been created in what was effectively someone’s basement which were simply awesome, because they were fuelled by passion and vision. I know of a few people who have worked at Nvidia in a technical role and didn’t necessarily go to school for graphics, or get a degree from college. They learned a lot on their own and spent their spare time writing a lot of code.
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Who needs qualifications when you've got a silencer and sharp suit? Click to enlarge.
That said, at some companies, a foundation or outright expertise in your field via a certification or degree can make the difference between getting an interview or not. In my case in particular I got a bit lucky. I came to meet some people who were willing to take a risk with hiring me because they saw that I was willing to work hard and I was really devoted to gaming and hardware. I was simply willing to do what it took to get involved with a company that really excited me (including a lot of volunteering and what was originally a 1.5 hour commute each way).
At some companies, I imagine that simply having contacts might be able to get you an interview, which can be very helpful, but it can’t sustain you as Pro-Aficient employee. I’m not totally convinced having contacts alone can accomplish that.
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Nvidia Global HQ - it doesn't look like a bad place to work, does it? Click to enlarge.
Q: Are certain roles more or less suited to having formal qualifications? Would you say you need to have a degree in game design to work at a game studio, for example, or could anyone find a role within either Nvidia or any of the companies you work with?
I believe the role is a big factor. Despite my experiences, for some roles you simply need to have a specific set of knowledge to build on top of immediately after you’re hired. For example, given my lack of knowledge or certification in the field of electrical engineering, I definitely shouldn’t be routeing signals for our next-generation GPUs, unless you’re looking for a fresh batch of GPU keychains!
More than anything, I think it comes down to what you know, and how well you know it. In my opinion, a degree means very little if a person did the bare minimum in school and didn’t bother to understand the material very well: they’d fail interviews for most companies, as interviews are usually pretty intense. I think most people would agree that a degree without actual knowledge isn’t useful.
Advice For Trying to Get a Job in IT or Nvidia
Q: Is there any advice you’d give to any of our readers that want to get into the gaming industry (either hardware or software), or into Nvidia specifically?
I’m probably not really in a position to give advice, but just commenting on my personal experiences, there were a few factors that came into play in my coming to work for Nvidia.
I was willing to volunteer to see where that led, I was willing to learn a lot, and I’d kept up with a decent knowledge of the industry by following lots of reviews and forums over the years. I’m not pretending to know or have kept up with everything, but following industry trends, digging into how things work, noticing how the industry evolves, and engaging in constructive discussion about these things to learn more is invaluable. I can say without a doubt that Nvidia is definitely a company that values a passion for GPUs and technology.
In general, I try to always go the extra mile, and stop looking at things from a short-term benefit perspective. I really feel that if a person commits quality to their work, eventually a person is usually rewarded for it, whether that be new opportunities at your job, contacts you’ve developed, or other means.
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Get the right qualifications, contacts and enthusiasm and you too could work at a desk like this! It's the desk of Clay Causin, Technical Analyst, by the way - we particularly like the inclusion of a full-sized sword. Click to enlarge.
Another thought I might mention is that a lot of education and knowledge isn’t really useful if a person doesn’t genuinely care about what they work on. I’m pretty convinced they won’t be as happy, productive, or successful if they don’t care about the results and invest themselves in their work.
Lastly, at the risk of sounding a bit cliché, I recognize that I really can’t expect things to just happen. As I mentioned, I was let go from Nvidia due to a re-organization, but if I hadn’t left some sort of good impression (with at least some people), and if I hadn’t sent an email to some of the guys I used to work with to keep in touch, I wouldn’t be at Nvidia today, with the chance to work with some awesome developers, games, and colleagues from all around the world. One instance of reaching out literally changed my circumstances.
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Nvidia's Developer Relations team gets to work on many big games, and well before the release date - this lineup looks like a PC gamer's top 10 wish list. Click to enlarge.
Sometimes it can be hard to find a window of opportunity to get into the industry simply because the timing isn’t right, or someone might be talking to the wrong person to get that opportunity. But I think if a person proves they want it badly enough, there is always a position for them somewhere close to what they want, and that could eventually lead to exactly the role they want if they prove they’re pretty determined and dedicated.
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