National Instruments Software Engineer reviews

You have to have a certain kind of personality to work here and enjoy it. This is a heavy engineer culture, so you get a lot of very straightforward, logical, traditional people who are very comfortable going to work everyday and living out the American Dream. The lack of cultural diversity and creative expression can very quickly become suffocating if that's not your thing. Especially if you're a new grad and don't have much experience choosing a workplace yet, be aware of this. Don't just go for NI's impressive name, but be sure to evaluate how comfortable you really feel here during the interview process. The other major problem is salary. This is particularly a problem with the software people. NI continues to try to sell candidates and employees on its stability and reasonable benefits, but it's still thinking like a hardware company. NI isn't fighting for software devs against companies like Agilent; it's going up against Google and Apple and Amazon and every other company in the world willing to pay to attract top software talent. In the last year of my employment, the (fairly small) org I was in saw probably around 10 people quit. Many of the senior people have had increasing amounts of work and stress placed on them, without anything close to competitive pay.

- There is a large portion of the workforce that's incredibly lazy. Getting people to work for projects outside their groups is discouraged, I've been discouraged multiple times from helping out other teams. Emphasis on quality goes out the window in order to meet deadlines. People who try and improve the quality of work as seen as obstacles to meeting the deadlines, when it should be the opposite. Blame is very easy to dish out, but not everyone owns up to mistakes. - Career growth is limited, especially if you are in AE. I have met multiple people who said that going into the ELP program was not what they thought they were signing up for. - Compensation is way below market average, and the management seems to have its head in the sand about the increasing costs of living in Austin. - If you switch teams, you can pretty much expect all the work you've done before to count for nothing. - Poor business planning for continuous years has led to non-existent bonuses and just rumours of raises. Every single time some external conditions are blamed, it's about time someone took a good look at our business strategy and owned up to the constant mistakes that have been made.