Pros
National Instruments provides opportunities to work in interesting and technically challenging areas with lots of flexibility in finding work that appeals to you. There are many different areas of development, and National Instruments makes it relatively easy to change from a group that isn't a good fit for you to one that you think will be better. Lots of opportunities to ride the bleeding edge of the technology curve with products based on the latest desktop and mobile processors, modern high bandwidth buses, wireless technologies, largest FPGAs, and pushing the envelope for multiprocessor software design. You get to work with lots of very smart and motivated people.
Cons
Irrational budgeting and purchasing policies lead to a large imbalance in the quality of equipment and supplies available between development groups. After promotion to senior software engineer, there's nowhere to go - almost nobody gets promoted beyond it, and there's virtually no other inducement to work harder and innovate. Buzzword bingo seems to dominate executive thinking. Greenwashing campaigns that are directed internally as well as externally, playing "me-too" with a lot of Microsoft corporate policies lead to a general feeling that they don't listen to what their own employees want so much as what the management of other big companies want.
