National Instruments reviews

The salaries aren't competitive for a mid-level engineer. Culture is a bit stuffy and the old-timers there vary wildly in ability and seem to be untouchable by management. I had a UX lead who doesn't answer e-mails, he just doesn't do it, and was never reprimanded for it. I also had principal engineer completely break my feature and call a meeting to blame me for it when our demo went poorly. There are also problems with tech leads and architects being so overworked they can't review code, which creates a huge bottleneck for lower level engineers. (You can imagine the panic when you've been waiting for a code review for a week and it comes back two days prior to end-of-sprint requesting major changes). Also: the feature you pour your heart and soul into is going to be outsourced as soon as it's stable, and heaven help you if you have to coordinate with off-shore teams because nobody tells them anything.

The Marketing organization is a chaotic mess-- full of self-important, questionably competent blowhards who tend to blame R&D for their misguided, non-evidence-based decisions. Too many of the executives have never worked anywhere else and lack perspective. Too much navel gazing about below-market salary and benefits and too little action. The company has too many managers-- why NI needs 30+ VPs is unclear. Some managers at Corporate seem so obsessed with planning that it is unclear if they actually ever get much done. We need to hire more engineers and to pay the good ones we already have competitive salaries.