National Instruments reviews

- The compensation is extremely poor. They claim that they offer industry-average compensation based on survey data for equivalent positions, but a quick look around Glassdoor will show you that’s not the case. As the cost of living in Austin has steadily risen, they haven’t kept up. Salary planning happens twice a year, and if you get a promotion, you have to wait until the next salary planning cycle to get a pay raise (and don’t expect a big one). Finally, the bonuses are terrible — they’re based entirely on company growth, not profit, and the growth target is unchanged from what it was in the ‘90s when NI was a fast-growing small company, meaning there’s no way they’ll ever come close to the target now. - The culture is not what it was. What’s left of it is friendly coworkers, a flexible work schedule, no dress code, and beer on Fridays (which the employees bring in). The previous feeling that “NI takes good care of its people” has evaporated, and little perks that the company used to provide to the employees, like a yearly family trip to Six Flags, are long since gone. As a result of the low compensation, it’s not really a high-performance culture any more. A lot of smart people work on pet projects, or just aren’t that motivated, because they’ve realized that if they work really hard toward the company goals, they’ll get a pat on the back or a token bonus. Management is reluctant to push because they don’t want people to leave. All this has led to pretty poor morale around the office. - Vacation is poor compared to what other companies offer. As a new hire, you start with 10 days of paid vacation, regardless of the experience you bring in. Over the last couple of years, vacation rollover between years was eliminated and then capped. - Benefits used to be very good, but they’ve been steadily cut back, and now they’re about average for the industry. Specifically, the vaunted health insurance plan (formerly a big selling point) was cut back, and many people have moved to the high-deductible plan. - NI devotes lots of effort to internal messaging. You’ll see banners all the time stating that “your work has a purpose” and “look at all these awesome things NI is enabling”. After each quarter, you’ll hear “we did great, another record quarter”, and then come time for salary planning, somehow things weren’t so good after all — it was a challenging market, the dollar was valued too high, or somebody stubbed their toe — so yet another low raise and bonus. - NI fell off the Fortune 100 Best Places to Work after 15 years on the list, and rather than addressing the issues head-on, employees got an email from Dr. T that upper management was listening to and considering the survey results, followed by more internal messaging that the percentage of people who said NI was a great place to work would have been enough to make the list in the past. Then, in the quarterly business presentation, they said they were putting together a working group to study the issues. Lots of listening and studying, not much acting and improving. - They’re seeing an uptick in attrition. Their response? Initially, message out that the level of attrition is normal given the improving economy, and institute a quarterly goal to “retain key employees”. (Well, who’s that?) Also, push harder on college recruiting. However, since college recruiting isn’t a dedicated team — employees take time away from their regular duties to go recruit on campus — the people who are getting stiffed on compensation are also the people tasked with recruiting more people to alleviate the pressure on compensation. In addition, NI talks about hiring the best and brightest, but their compensation and reputation is no longer enough for them to actually attract and retain these people.

For a technical company there is very little to be inspired about here. Tepid growth with no real technical leadership (this is a high tech company that doesn't have a CTO and absolutely no hardware design representation in senior leadership). When most of the high profile projects you've had for the last 5 years are "better" versions of existing products it says a lot about the "vision". Leadership never shares any interesting plans to grow the company in the current stagnant state - only excuses for why we are flat rather than growing in the low single digits (weak dollar, weak PMI). The most interesting thing about company meetings here is making a bingo card that doesn't contain the words "PMI", "Headwinds" or "cautiously optimistic". This is a company that is well known for being average to below average in compensation but the most incredible part about compensation at NI is that there is no incentive to perform or go above and beyond and even less incentive to stick with the company in the form of RSUs. Brand new hires will have more RSUs than many people who have been with the company 5-10 years at this point due to the nonsensical policy tying RSU grants to company growth (which has been abysmal for the last 5 years). Again, just uninspiring. Leadership here is basically just flying a holding pattern waiting for the broader economy to grow so they can get larger RSU grants or promoted "to enable growth". Their bonus targets are too conservative and there is no incentive for them to take any risk to hit the targets, so nobody does and just blames the overall economy.