National Instruments reviews

AE management is a joke. Your "manager" is someone as tenured as you, which means they are about 24 years old and are supposed to be in charge of your career development despite the fact they haven't developed their own career yet. NI stands for "no income". Salary is nowhere near competitive over time. The worse part about this is management and HR know this and continue to spew corporate crap about how it's in line with the rest of the measurement/automation industry and our "whole package" is great. The problem is, even the "whole package" isn't great. The health benefits have been decimated and aren't as good as they are with my new company. I doubled my income when I left NI! NI talks a lot about corporate culture and how it's a great place to work, and 10 years ago it was probably the best place to work in Austin. However, Austin has exploded in the last few years with silicon valley giants like Google, Apple, Facebook and Evernote moving into town. Austin has become "Silicon Hills", and there are a lot of great places to work in Austin now. The culture at other companies in town is as good or better than NI, so many talented NI people have realized that they can make more money and not sacrifice culture and still work in Austin. The best people are leaving in droves. Although there are still many top performers at NI, there are a lot of average and low performing people still there because they don't have anywhere else to go. NI is a great place to work - if you are an average or low performing person. It sucks if you're a high performer and want to be rewarded for your merits.

Compensations and Benefits are completely off the market standards. Whats worse is that the management seems to be blind to it. Too much emphasis on culture. I think they fail to realize that almost all American companies provide similar culture. Reducing salary by almost 40% less than market standards in the pretext that "Hey the culture is superb". Its ridiculous.