Pros
Really smart and competent colleagues. When they were hiring like mad, they hired some great people. The technology is pretty darn cool. What we're doing with big data, classification in particular, I honestly think is ground-breaking. The website has come light years since the first of the year, due to a big push to get marketable software out the door, and not just devote our resources to a substandard internal use-only site.
Cons
"Work hard, play hard" used to be the motto, and that really appealed to me, and was a big reason I chose to work here. The company grew like crazy in 2012 and 2013, and somewhere around spring of 2013, they realized they had hired too many analysts, and were still lacking market-ready software. Fortunately, their first reaction was to build out the engineering and product teams, which you do if you want to create and sell software. Unfortunately, this was the same time the "fun, loose startup culture" started to deteriorate. The poop really hit the fan in late February 2014 when the largest client (25% of all revenue) decided not to renew their annual contract. This really hurt, because NI is essentially just a giant consulting company with a really cool internal data application. Management's reaction was nothing short of a freak-out. Of the roughly 150 employees we had at the beginning of 2014, we're down to about 120 now, I think. 22 or so were layoffs that came immediately after the bad news about the client. And I remember the CEO giving some really callous post-layoff pep talk, which pretty much started and ended with "Get over it!". I think that speech turned a lot of people off. 6 people have quit in the month since then, and paranoia is in the air. I know several colleagues are actively job-hunting. Morale is low.