National Instruments reviews

Product development cycles are slow. Product management is very ad hoc and decision making is without good leadership. Road-maps are product-oriented and strictly tactical; there is a lack in strategic platform development. (This lack is an important problem for a company that wants to create platforms.) The CEO jumps from technology to technology in a matter of weeks and then product teams develop it. It's hit or miss: sometimes the products are successful, sometimes there's just operational waste. Software development practices are very political so it takes wrangling to get good designs: many things must be used by fiat. As a consequence, the software is bloated. The company hires straight from college, so there isn't much technical depth. And when there is individual technical depth, those individuals get lost in the sea of mediocrity. The company is slow in it's uptake of current technologies. When the company works on current generation technologies, the product development lifecycle takes so long that when the product is released, the next generation technology has already released. This makes sense considering that a given product probably needs to be supplied for at least a decade, but this hardly makes a company a high-tech company. Salaries are below par. This leads to all sorts of problems. Namely, the company lacks good technical leadership because those with technical depth can get a significantly better paying job someplace else. But, this seems to be part of the business plan, so you really can't fault it. Management in the company is also hit or miss. Unfortunately, the misses don't leave nor are there good feedback mechanisms to make sure that the misses are asked to leave. Unfortunately, the Applications Engineering program is part brainwashing: many that come from AE usually have the NI religion. The NI religion explains why it is one of the top 100 best places to work (according to Fortune).

Senior management is largely content to spend their time synthesizing buzz words, so new major initiatives are very rare, meaning that as a developer, you would likely spend most of your time tweeking old products, ad nauseum. New features/products, when initiated, are typically conceived low in the management hierarchy via "NI Vision", which means, "without conventional marketing due diligence", making the process political, chaotic, and unfocused, especially for software. Take a close look at an NI print ad in a trade publication to gauge NI's outbound marketing sophistication. NI hires straight out of school, which fosters in-bred, unconventional management philosophies that originate from pop psychology books. Seasoned managers hired from outside to 'fix' dysfunctional groups typically fail. You would likely experience severe culture shock in moving from NI to any other company. There are many long-time employees that are Dilbert-esque "Wallys", who chronically under-perform, but not bad enough to be fired. Since NI has never had a layoff, they just accumulate. If you start at NI, you really need to find the self discipline to move on, once you have learned enough to make yourself valuable elsewhere. Just be sure to look at any management skills you have learned at NI in the proper light. If you find yourself whining about compensation, management, boring assignments, lack of opportunities for advancement, or clueless marketing, it's time to go.