Being a technical writer at Initech, er, National Instruments is about the most paper-pushing, clerical, bureaucratic job you can find. Almost nothing I enjoy about technical writing is present in my job. Like being a user advocate? Too bad, because a team of engineers already decided how they want the documentation, and you have no influence. Like to write? Well, you won’t be doing much of that, thanks to arcane in-house tools and processes that devour most of your time. Like clear communication? A technical writer’s job at NI is not well defined, so someone can come to you at the last minute to tell you you haven’t done something no one told you was part of your job. Like feeling valued? Hardly anyone thanks you, even when you’ve put in extra hours fixing someone else’s mistakes.
The internal processes are obese and inflexible, and you’ll spend a lot more time making sure things are done according to a process than actually solving a problem. A small issue becomes emailing a committee, then that committee emails another committee, and “have you done the steps yet because the committee can’t do anything until you do all the steps, whoops, someone forgot a step, hold everything, let’s form another committee.”
I’ll grant that the work-life balance is usually good, but what do you expect when salaries are about 15% below average? National Instruments is squeezing as much work as they possibly can out of their employees, and paying them as little as they can without resistance. Hmm, I wonder why the workforce is predominately new grads?
National Instruments says it is a vision-driven company. Ok then, why would they build a manufacturing plant in Austin and then lay off all the plant workers? Where is the vision there? Why is ni.com an information architecture nightmare? Why doesn't anybody know what other groups are doing? Each group is solving the same problems for itself, duplicating their efforts over and over and over. If it’s a vision-driven company, then there are gaping holes in the vision.
Also, vacation is the worst of any place I’ve ever worked. You accrue vacation as the year goes on, but you can only carry over 20 hours of vacation to the next year (they JUST raised it up from zero hours). So if you want to take a vacation early on in the year, you have to get approval from multiple managers, go negative on your vacation balance, and then accrue that time back before you can go on vacation again.
