employer cover photo
employer logo
employer logo

National Instruments

Is this your company?

National Instruments reviews

3.7

68% would recommend to a friend

(2,457 total reviews)

Alex Davern

63% approve of CEO

46% positive business outlook

National Instruments has an employee rating of 3.7 out of 5 stars, based on 2,457 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The National Instruments employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Manufactura industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
2.0
Apr 30, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Lots of great coworkers, an extremely smart group of people.

Cons

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.

1.0
Jun 24, 2018

There's no heart left at NI

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good work-life balance, good benefits, family-friendly

Cons

When Dr. T retired in 2017, the heart left NI. The new CEO is very focused on the bottom line at the expense of the employees. Layoffs of people seemingly selected at random, truly inexplicable reporting structures implemented, and a change in retirement policy that robbed 20+ year veterans of the company of a huge amount of their retirement. It's truly sad to me to see such a lack of respect and appreciation for people who spent their entire careers at NI. Pay is dramatically lower than industry norms. The management team hodls quarterly town halls saying they are "looking into" the benefits and compensation packages, but nothing ever changes. A few years ago they raised the entry level vacation accrual by a week but didn't cascade that increase to employees who had already reached that level, so it basically penalized people who'd spent several years at the company.

3.0
Jul 11, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

If you join straight out of college, you'll meet a lot of people your age and make friendships that will last a long time. They make it a very easy transition from college life to professional life. Drinking at your desk is fine, and overall the company supports a lot of alcohol related activities.

Cons

Benefits are awful. Salary sucks, healthcare is garbage, and raises and spot bonuses are a joke. They will constantly remind you how great NI is to work for, and how lucky you are to have a job, but the reality is that the fun culture they once had is gone. Additionally, 90% of the companies in Austin have an "Austin Culture", so there's nothing unique about working at NI. The brainwashing at NI is strong.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 2,457 Reviews

Glassdoor has 2,924 National Instruments reviews submitted anonymously by National Instruments employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if National Instruments is right for you.