National Instruments reviews

Leadership is clueless on how to right the ship Raises are minuscule and don't keep pace with inflation Benefits are a bit outdated Overly political, process, check list oriented Below average pay. When you finally get to the the point of making good money, you're an outlier and become a target for layoff/separation. Salary compression is real. Stagnant growth for years now with the new product pipeline very stale and basically trying to recycle the same products and strategy into new markets. It's too much of a leap for many new customers and they tend to stick with the status quo or something cheaper. Meaningless catch phrases, broken promises from leadership, endless optimism with no effective plan to drive it home Profit sharing targets not hit in over 20 years. Until recently, the target annual growth was 40% which hadn't been achieved since the 90's. It was finally lowered to 20% which is still extremely unrealistic. 5% is more likely, if even possible. Who suffers from this? The employees, not executive leadership! The only value in the ESPP plan is cashing in on the 15% discount as the price has been flat for many years. You may get lucky by selling on a market up tick but those are typically years apart. Too many golden parachute Executives (mostly externally hired now) with no understanding of the industry, customer base, and win whether or not the company is successful. They are not held accountable for failed plans and visions, yet still received ridiculous raises, bonuses, stock options, and guaranteed buy out. They're puppets playing the game and then on to the next gig while many dedicated employees are holding the company together. NI is now a stepping stone, not a career builder

TLDR; If you genuinely enjoy doing software engineering and care about your career opportunities, then this ain't it chief. The software engineering culture here is subpar. Executive leadership constantly tries to prop NI's R&D as world-class and competitive with giants like Microsoft when in reality the level isn't comparable. Technical leadership lacks talent yet is full of hubris which has resulted in the company falling 10+ years behind the industry standard in terms of software. What the above means to the average NI software engineer: - The majority of the engineers you work with range from mediocre to low-performing. Many of these people have been working at NI for a long time (10-15+ years) and have gotten complacent. They've pigeonholed themselves into the company and lack the skills to go anywhere else. Most of the smarter people saw the writing on the wall and have moved on already. - You will be forced to use NI's outdated proprietary software and languages. Nobody talks about this openly but everyone is aware of how harmful this is in terms of career opportunities. - You'll be stuck using old technologies and interacting with decades worth of legacy code. This is only made worse by the fact that most of it is in-house stuff that NI loves to dogfood which has resulted in lots of code rot. - You won't have many opportunities to innovate in terms of software. Technical leadership is behind the times and resistant to new ideas so it's either their way or the highway. The company culture here is best described as delusional. Execute leadership constantly tries to sell NI as a modern tech company when it really isn't, and there's no shortage of company emails and meetings that reek of corporate doublespeak and kool-aid. Leadership will stop at nothing in the name of shareholders, which includes laying off a significant portion of engineering R&D. Management is out of touch with engineers and pretends to be on their side when in reality there's constant politics and playing favorites involved. Finally, the pay. The short answer here is that it will always remain below average by ~20-30% of the industry standard no matter what. Leadership have been playing a game of bait and switch for over a decade now, constantly promising that they're going to improve compensation and never delivering. Instead money is used for frivolous things such as expensive campus renovations and rebranding campaigns. Negotiating with management is a waste of time - the answer is always "there's no budget" regardless of performance. To make for all of this, leadership tries to sheepishly sell you some kool-aid on how the combined compensation package with benefits is still competitive (pro tip: it's not).