Good job out of college, but limited potential industry
Pros
I was hired to NI out of the internship program, which I completed the summer between my junior and senior year at college. NI is a great first company because the transition from college to professional life is fairly seamless. Work hours are flexible, dress code is whatever goes and co-workers are usually pretty laid back and easy to talk to. Since there are so many employees getting hired out of college, it is easy to make friends outside work at the company. The company likes to hold events to celebrate employees such as deck parties with beer and food (though both tend to run out quickly, now). They also used to rent out Six Flags Fiesta for a weekend for all employees and friends, which has now not happened for 2-3 years. When they're doing these activities, it is fun. Your experience will also go as far as your manager (more on this in the cons section). My first two managers at this company were awesome in that they weren't stubborn, pushy or micro-managers. My current manager is all three of these things. The company is extremely stable--they only recently are going through their first round of layoffs in Austin. Stock plans are good and, depending on your group, managers are fairly generous with restricted stock bonuses. They have a high deductible health plan which is useful if you're relatively healthy or have a known major expense, which both applied to me this year. They match 401(k) contributions up to 3% and charitable gifts up to some amount as well. This has changed since I started but they had a very good process in place to sponsor non-U.S. citizen employees and set up the employment-based green card process.
Cons
Salaries are way below average and the growth rate of salaries is also extremely low. It is strange that NI is okay with senior-level engineers departing regularly instead of keeping them in house and rewarding them appropriately. This churn is especially evident at the 5-year mark, where the first round of RSUs (awarded with the job offer) are completely vested. The low salary is fine if NI excelled in the other things--work/life balance, work hour flexibility, etc. However, this will completely depend on your manager. My new manager is not very open to work hour flexibility and as a result it doesn't make sense to be paid the amount you are and do the work you're expected to in a rigid work hour situation. Even the industry itself is not very interesting for CS graduates since the majority of clients are other engineers. The technology that NI works on is very cool for Electrical and Mechanical Engineers because that is their calling. As a software engineer with only a CS background, you're a glorified code monkey. This is not NI's fault, but it is also a reason they don't retain a lot of CS talent. They are a hardware company at the forefront, and that is fairly obvious. The short-term planning by the executives also leaves a lot to be desired. Management has flip-flopped between aggressively growing the company to staying even via attrition year-to-year. It seems they are not being as conservative as they were before in watching what the economy does (or modeling and predicting it accurately). What this means is that you end up with a lot of new hires during a recession with tenured employees having to be told that they'll be getting no bonuses and no raises.
