I used to love it, but it's been in steady decline over the last decade.
Pros
Life/work balance was really nice, most of the time. There were busy crunch periods with some very long weeks, but that is reasonable when it's only a couple of times a year. I found there are a lot of sharp, knowledgable, friendly, and helpful co-workers. Not everybody had an open door, so to speak, but most people were great teammates. However, I'm concerned that with NI's new performance-driven incentives, it's going to get a lot more cutthroat as employees feel pitted against each other. Time will tell on that.
Cons
They pay really low but keep giving lip service that they are working on that...for over three years now. I was willing to put up with the low pay for a long time because I enjoyed the pros/benefits enough. They are making changes but you are going to have to fight like hell to be at the very top to get the big raises and bonuses. Say bye to your work/life balance. Over the last 5 years, upper management has been having a Game of Thrones or something because they just want to bombard the staff with info on what they are doing. Once you add in those meetings, standup, team meetings, working on performance reviews, etc. I found my time had been so sliced and diced that I had very little focus time left to get actual real relevant work done. On dev work, I could have a medium-size code change I want to get in and end up with 10-20 reviewers on the pull-request, many of whom would ask questions about code that wasn't changed in this request because they just wanted to find something/anything to say, "See, I'm doing work too!" The red-tape on this would take almost two weeks to get in an uncontroversial medium-sized change. I felt I had pretty much zero autonomy in my last few years at NI.
