Internship at NVIDIA 2014

Chapter 6: Conclusion

In conclusion the summer internship at NVIDIA was really great experience! I had a chance to meet and work with some "big names" in computer graphics field as well as talented people in my team. Now I am looking forward for releases of all the cool GPUs I have learned about.

Thank you for reading all the way here. I hope that the information here will encourage some of you to apply to NVIDIA or other similar company in the Silicon Valley.

To conclude this article I will answer the number one question everybody asks me:

What was better? Google or NVIDIA?

A short answer is in the next few paragraphs.

NVIDIA vs. Google

First let me say that this answer is very biased. The experience depends on many factors like the team, project, location, friends, and many more.

Anyway, overall I feel that my Google internship experience was better than NVIDIA's. It was better especially in the coding aspect. I liked the coding infrastructure at Google better. All the tools were working together beautifully, code review process was straight forward, testing was seamless.

At NVIDIA I was sometimes waiting a day for some test results that told me that my code just crashed. My problem with NVIDIA might be caused by the Linux/Windows split between "mobile" and "the rest" parties. There were some incompatibilities that were causing non-smooth coding. Also, NVIDIA produces hardware which makes the code more low-level and heavy on various macros.

However, I have to say that the coding situation in NVIDIA is changing and improving rapidly. Many services are getting web-based interfaces and the whole OS dependency is getting thinner. Only for the time I was in NVIDIA there were several tools developed to address the issues.

There were also things that I enjoyed more in NVIDIA than in Google. Everyday lunch with all team members was really great experience. And yes, the party at Jen-Hsun Huang's house was just incredible! Thank you for the experience of a lifetime!