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.
