National Instruments reviews

NI tries to hire the best and brightest, but pay is less than average, and the company tries to avoid the issue by saying it uses a 3rd party industry comparison to ensure salaries in line and bring up the "total package" argument as well as highly-discourages sharing your salary amount with anyone else. Health care isn't as good as it used to be years ago. Once you start achieving a higher rank it's still hard to feel valued or that your opinions matter. You spend more time arguing for resources you need to get your job done than what it would cost to just go buy what you need. Praise, bonuses, or any other positive encouragement is very infrequent. Lots of inefficiency and delay caused by consensus-driven decision making, and management changing their mind about where focus should be or changing their mind about critical decisions during the design process.

I have worked with several different groups, and they've all been very different. Some managers are there because they get enjoyment out of helping employees develop. Some are there because they feel they need to tick a box on a checklist to progress their career. It's unclear if they do, as while there is a lot of transparency in career progression, NI operates on a broad, conceptual level; people will interpret the same guidelines very differently. With a fair amount of autonomy and good but vague guidance, a lot of groups have drifted very far apart. The right hand often doesn't know what the left is doing, tilling the fertile soil of misunderstanding for a bumper crop of contradiction. The stated expectation of a balanced 40 hour week is vocally contradicted by a manager who says 50 would be barely enough. The egalitarian advancement policy buckles under the weight of employees who are hand-picked for high-visibility opportunities. Some employees are coaxed into new roles because they feel turning down the opportunity would look bad. Information percolates slowly, which can lead to the spinning of wheels. It's hard to know how to bring something to the attention of the right people sometimes, and it may be too late by the time it gets there.