employer cover photo
employer logo
employer logo

National Instruments

Is this your company?

National Instruments reviews

3.7

65% would recommend to a friend

(457 total reviews)

Alex Davern

58% approve of CEO

44% positive business outlook

Reviews by job title

457 reviews

Reviews about "Career Development"

Return to all reviews
2.0
May 14, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Sick time and vacation time accrued separately. Lax about leaving during the day for appointments. Casual dress code. Good medical plan.

Cons

The technical interview for this position was easier than my first semester intro to programming class, and not reflective of the position. It seems the criteria used is for what the job entailed six years ago and is no longer good. They do not care about giving me the training I need to accomplish the tasks they assign me. The company is big on "ownership", but is terrible on following through. I am told constantly to fix issues that I come across in my work, and that it is what is expected of me as a technician if I want to get good reviews and advance. But the cause of most of these issues are the owners (engineers who have been promoted during their stay at the company) not following through on their ownership responsibilities. Hypocritical. Additionally, I usually lack the knowledge needed to fix those issues due to lack or training. If NI doesn't want to give new hires the necessary training, then they need to update their hiring criteria. Hardware, which is required for most of these tasks, is scarce. Supposedly, this is from other groups poaching from us so they don't have to use their budget code for hardware. So, eventually someone scrounges up some pre-production version that will only be for some of the testing you need to do, and you have to make do with that. Documentation is terrible. There are at least three different intranets that I know of where we document and no one updates any of it, so knowledge here remains tribal. You have to try and hunt down the people who know what it is that you need to know, and all of them are very busy.

2.0
Apr 30, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Lots of great coworkers, an extremely smart group of people.

Cons

For 40 years, the major draw of NI had been NI's internal company culture. It had been a very family and employee focused thinktank, focused on innovation and unity. When the stock market tanked in 2008 and company revenue fell hard, the company voted to take a company-wide % pay cut in order to prevent laying off anyone, and once the market recovered restored those salaries back to normal. All of this began to rapidly change once the old CEO (Dr. James Truchard, commonly known around NI as Dr. T) retired in 2017. The new CEO, Alex Davern, is essentially Micheal Dell from the 1990's. He is a cold, hard numbers guy and the culture is changing to reflect that. Immediately after becoming the CEO in 2017, he ordered NI to release our "Next Gen" version of LabVIEW to show the investors "he was making progress", despite the fact that the platform was still 2 years away from being usable. The product was so unstable and premature that we had a number of meetings regarding what to call it because we were afraid people would think it was the same as LabVIEW (normal), our flagship product and therefore lose customers. We settled on LabVIEW NXG and shipped it, despite knowing it would likely result in problems for a lot of people. In April of 2018, to celebrate his one-year anniversary as CEO, he ordered an indiscriminate layoff of a couple of hundred people, to shave a % off the company's budget before quarterly result posting.

4.0
Apr 5, 2018

Great Place to Work

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Nice people and many opportunities to learn.

Cons

Susceptible to Brazil's current economic situation.

Viewing 232 - 234 of 457 Reviews

Glassdoor has 2,930 National Instruments reviews submitted anonymously by National Instruments employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if National Instruments is right for you.