NI is a good place to start, but be looking for better opportunities elsewhere
Pros
Lots of smart, hard-working young people who generate a lot of energy/passion. Thousands of customers and thousands of products make the company stable and financially robust, and bring lots of interesting use cases. Exposure to customers and technologies help build marketable skills--NI is a great place to start.
Cons
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.
