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National Instruments

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National Instruments reviews about "layoff"

44% positive business outlook

Reviews by job title

94 reviews
3.0
Jan 22, 2021

Glory days are in the past

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Excellent office location, great courtyard/commons area

Cons

Percentage-based layoff strategies are very common

4.0
Nov 11, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good benefits, salary is not great but it's ok. Nice culture with a friendly environment

Cons

Extra time is needed to meet job requirements. You will end working more and extra time is not ever considered to be paid. Instability of positions, layoffs

2.0
Feb 2, 2021

You get what you're paid for.

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Great work-life balance. I frequently have the opportunity to take time in the middle of my day for things like errands, doctor's appointments, picking up/dropping off children, etc. This is really the thing that's kept me at the company as long as I've been there. Leadership understands pretty well that we're human and have human things to which we must tend. I don't have much to add in the way of detail, but it truly is great. - The people are, on the whole, pretty friendly. - Opportunities to work remote/from home - Starting vacation is 3 weeks. - A LOT of sick time. I've never once had to care about how much sick time I have left, because I always have a laughably large amount. - Lots of opportunities to change roles within the company and pursue your interests - The people around you tend to be pretty smart! - Not a lot of office drama. There's the normal politicking at the leadership level, but for most people, it's a pretty mellow place to work. The average age outside of Sales and Support is somewhere around 40 by my estimation, which is probably a contributing factor. - Clothing rules are very lax. Depending on the department, you could even get away with shorts, a t-shirt, and flip flops. Jeans are more common, though. You'd have to look pretty terrible for your clothing to be a problem.

Cons

- The company is a very standard company-- the office culture is very Office Space. - The physical office is horrible. They've taken some steps to address it lately (remodeling the cafeteria, for example) and the grounds are generally pretty nice, but the cubicles have definitely been there longer than I've been alive. - Regular layoffs despite advertising as a company that does not do layoffs. While recruiting, they say a lot about how well they handled the 2008 recession and how they've been on the "Best Places to Work" list many times, omitting that neither of those apply to their practices over the last few years. The layoffs are also usually followed by a round of hires overseas. While I enjoy working with all my colleagues across the world, I have been told point-blank by management that the reason we hire internationally so much is that "foreign employees are cheaper." - Compensation is regularly below industry standard. Internally it's one of the most common complaints, and kind of accepted as the trade-off for the flexibility in your schedule. Some years, my raises didn't even cover inflation. The "lack of budget" also manifests in lack of formal training. Instead, you learn new skills through trial-by-fire. - Constant org redesigns. In the entire time I've been here, I have not once felt stable/secure in my role. - C-suite seems very disconnected from day-to-day operations. It's not uncommon for us to get mandates for new ways of operating <1 month before we're expected to make the change. - IT in particular is a disaster-- all of the solutions are propped up with match sticks, tooth picks, and duct tape. Leadership doesn't consider IT a priority, even though almost 100% of daily operations rely on it, leading to frustration across the board about lack of IT bandwidth and IT's inability to build/fix the solutions needed for the "quick change of direction" mentioned above. - THERE ARE VIRTUALLY NO BLACK PEOPLE. There are plenty of people from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds... except Black. In the entire time I've been at the company, I've met exactly one Black person that wasn't either custodial staff or security. The CEO pays a lot of lip service to BLM, but I've seen no reforms whatsoever to our hiring practices. Oh, and the Diversity & Inclusion lead is white. - Rampant sexism. Although there are plenty of women employed, almost all of leadership is older, white men. There's no real path for addressing sexism in the office; I certainly wouldn't feel safe reporting sexism even if it was making me miserable. - The benefits keep getting worse. Once upon a time, in the distant past, the benefits were so good that "you could have a baby for $50," as said by my long-timer colleague. Now, every year they increase the cost of benefits over pace of inflation, switch to cheaper providers, and then email-blast us with slide shows about how their benefits package is "competitive" and, bafflingly, how we should be using our healthcare as little as possible (???) to keep costs down for the company (?????????). - Annual bonuses are tied to company performance... and the company doesn't do well. In the years that we have had bonuses, they were a laughable amount. I'm talking, like, $200 for employees with salaries upwards of $80k. Unless, of course, you're in senior leadership. Anyone with a job title of "Director" or higher gets an ACTUAL annual bonus,-- regardless of company performance-- while simultaneously nodding sympathetically at the concerns of us peons about our pitiful salaries. I'm not even a disgruntled employee. I'm fairly comfortable with my role in the company, but this is a pretty exhaustive list of the sorts of things you're expected to tolerate for the flexibility you get. If you value that flexibility pretty highly (as I do), this may be a perfectly suitable place to work. If you value any of the things in my cons list... I would urge you to reconsider working here.

3.0
Jan 12, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Pretty good benefit and good salary, good people.

Cons

Recently, so much re-org, layoff due to re-branding. Most managers have no responsible.

2.0
Jan 14, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Before original CEO left, the company had a very "we are in this together" attitude, which created a sense of camaraderie and collaboration where all employees felt valued and their contributions truly appreciated.

Cons

Most managers at the company have technical backgrounds with little to no experience actually managing and leading people. They are promoted out of technical roles they are actually great at and made into people managers because the company had no clear career paths laid out for people who achieved their level of expertise in their respective technical roles. They were basically "failed forward" not by their failures, but due to the company's failure of career path vision, and as a result, most managers have no idea how to actually be good people managers and fail at it regularly. Managers stopped collaborating with their teams and employees were basically turned into task-monkeys. Management adopted a "your input no longer matters so shut up and do the job we tell you to do or get laid off" attitude. It became an incredibly toxic work environment.

5.0
Mar 7, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

-*finally* competitive salaries -excellent work-life balance -mobility in your career path -a new drive to diversify the workforce

Cons

-layoffs are happening more frequently -work is being outsourced -large imbalance between the top paid workers and lowest paid workers

3.0
Feb 11, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Pretty flexible schedule wise, I have never had anyone question why I had to be away from desk or why I had to go and run some kind of quick errand during the day. The company has been very understanding of employees needing extra flexibility due to the pandemic.

Cons

Previously employee satisfaction was at least something leadership talked about frequently and appeared to make genuine efforts at improving, in the first few years after falling off pretty much all great places to work list senior management made a big deal out of trying to figure out why and improve it. However, the main recommendation they came up with was increasing pay. While average to lower than average pay was something people complained about but I think most long term employees would not have chosen higher pay if it meant significant changes to the things they liked about working here. To fund the increase in pay senior management reduced hiring to below replacement levels. That was about 5 and pay increased a little bit but but not enough to make up for the fact that senior management wanted the same or higher output from a smaller workforce. More recently there have been layoffs with the justification that they are needed to align the workforce with the ongoing reorganization. During this time aggressive growth targets have been maintained resulting in more work for less people. Recently there has been a mixed message from senior leadership where they talk about increasing revenue growth by being "bold" and "ambitious" while they seem to primarily focus on reducing costs to improve short term profitability.

3.0
Jan 13, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great place for work-life balance. More layoffs happening now; however, still examples of people doing minimal work and not having an issue continuing employment.

Cons

No growth. Company reorganizes every year but still hasn't figured out how to grow from original 90's goals.

Viewing 16 - 18 of 94 Reviews

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