National Instruments Manager reviews

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.

some processes must be improved