The whole process took about a month, I submitted by resume and online portfolio, and after two weeks i got a phone call to ask me to come in. The corporate office is very nice. The interview process took about 1.5 hours. During the entire session, I was in a small room. It started off with just two people. Then three showed up. After 15 mins, then three more people showed up in front of me. Total of 8 people group panel in front of you. I felt a little uncomfortable and the room gotten hotter as we proceed with the interview. Later it gotten harder to breath because it's just so small with too many people inside. I was bombarded with questions regarding to my job experience, skills, design process, past projects, software, etc... All the questions came at the same time from different people. It was very crazy, almost dis-organized in a way.
Once the interview is done, the other seven people had left the room, I was immediately offered a job with a hourly rate. I was surprised at the time that this was a contractor job, not a full-time. Later I've found out that it's just the culture at NVIDIA that they don't hire full-time. They want to "try" you out first without any obligations. If you are "good" as you say you are... then after about a year or so, they will promote you to full-time employee with benefits. So I took the job as a full-time contractor, and the job started about a week after. For about a year after that day, I was without health benefits and stock options. To report my hours, and get a pay-check, I had to report to their internal contract agency - Kelly Services, later switched to West Valley Staffing.
