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National Instruments

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National Instruments reviews

3.7

68% would recommend to a friend

(2,459 total reviews)

Alex Davern

62% approve of CEO

46% positive business outlook

National Instruments has an employee rating of 3.7 out of 5 stars, based on 2,459 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The National Instruments employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Manufacturing industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
2.0
Feb 8, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Benefits are great. Typical bigger company benefits like 401k, better medical plans, etc. Some parts of the organization are healthier than others, most of it is determined by the VP in charge and how mature s/he is as a leader and visionary. VP spots are tenured, so plan to actively work to move to another if you find yourself under a dud. Coworkers are smart and nice on the whole. The company encourages friendships and this is easily done at happy hours and other events.

Cons

Senior management has become out of touch with the lower ranks, most notably Dr T. All the vice presidents are actually "yes men" (okay there are *finally* multiple women vice presidents as of 2015...only 40 years in since the company's inception; can you say good Ole boys club?) For US based employees it is doubtful there will ever be any more glory days. Plan to watch more and more jobs go overseas. You'll be waking up early to work with European countries and staying up late to work with Asian countries. Work life balance that supposed to be amazing only exists if you are in engineering. Any other part of the organization you can expect to work a typical 50 to 60 HR week. Finally, know that if you have worked at NI longer than 5 years your salaries are compressed. This used to be compensated by the incentive stock options, but now that they have changed to restricted stock options much fewer people are given any reason to stay.

1.0
Nov 15, 2015

NI - A great place to intern

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Interns get meaningful projects that are used for years to come. The products that NI makes are incredibly useful for engineers. The location in Austin is convenient.

Cons

Pay is too low for expected work. Pay is inadequate for cost of living in Austin. Growth has stagnated and so have career opportunities. Employee sentiment is low and the leadership refuses to improve compensation. Employees are not offered industry standard certifications (PMP, Lean, Six Sigma, etc.), instead the employees are given the "NI" version which is not useful outside of NI. This makes it hard for long term employees to leave. There is no transparency to the compensation model. Titles do not match the work that employees do.

2.0
Nov 7, 2015

Software Engineer

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The onsite cafeteria is super convenient. Decent benefits. Smart and helpful/friendly coworkers.

Cons

You have to have a certain kind of personality to work here and enjoy it. This is a heavy engineer culture, so you get a lot of very straightforward, logical, traditional people who are very comfortable going to work everyday and living out the American Dream. The lack of cultural diversity and creative expression can very quickly become suffocating if that's not your thing. Especially if you're a new grad and don't have much experience choosing a workplace yet, be aware of this. Don't just go for NI's impressive name, but be sure to evaluate how comfortable you really feel here during the interview process. The other major problem is salary. This is particularly a problem with the software people. NI continues to try to sell candidates and employees on its stability and reasonable benefits, but it's still thinking like a hardware company. NI isn't fighting for software devs against companies like Agilent; it's going up against Google and Apple and Amazon and every other company in the world willing to pay to attract top software talent. In the last year of my employment, the (fairly small) org I was in saw probably around 10 people quit. Many of the senior people have had increasing amounts of work and stress placed on them, without anything close to competitive pay.

Viewing 46 - 48 of 2,459 Reviews

Glassdoor has 2,926 National Instruments reviews submitted anonymously by National Instruments employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if National Instruments is right for you.