National Instruments reviews

The salaries aren't competitive for a mid-level engineer. Culture is a bit stuffy and the old-timers there vary wildly in ability and seem to be untouchable by management. I had a UX lead who doesn't answer e-mails, he just doesn't do it, and was never reprimanded for it. I also had principal engineer completely break my feature and call a meeting to blame me for it when our demo went poorly. There are also problems with tech leads and architects being so overworked they can't review code, which creates a huge bottleneck for lower level engineers. (You can imagine the panic when you've been waiting for a code review for a week and it comes back two days prior to end-of-sprint requesting major changes). Also: the feature you pour your heart and soul into is going to be outsourced as soon as it's stable, and heaven help you if you have to coordinate with off-shore teams because nobody tells them anything.

You are a customer support representative. There are some days when I get to use my engineering degree but they are few and far between. The work is not very rewarding and it can takes upwards of 3 years to move into a position you will actually enjoy such as marketing or R&D. This is a feeder into the rest of the company and is treated like a minor/easy job. The management is chosen directly from this group and is thus inexperienced and constantly changing.