National Instruments Reviews

Pros

- Great learning environment
- Employee friendly
- Good balance of work and personal life
- Great benefits, esp. health insurance

Cons

- Limited career advancement
- Incompetent mid-level management
- Lower salary

Advice to Senior Management

Please pay attention to mid-level managers a little more.

Pros

Extremely laid back work place
Accommodating to families
Challenging and fun environment
Employees empowered to do what interests them.
On-site health center
Nice campus
Strong management at the highest levels

Cons

Pay is not competitive outside of the engineering or sales groups
Horrible maternity leave policy (partially result of a dominantly male workplace)
Health care/Insurance was one of the strongest points, but now decreasing (not entirely NI's fault)
Despite increasing number of females, still very male dominated in management positions
Job growth is primarily outside of the US

Advice to Senior Management

Salaries outside of the core engineering and sales groups needs major evaluation. It is not competitive and as a result we are losing talent in some key positions. Maternity leave is abysmal and extremely discouraging for any female employees considering having children.

Pros

Very Family friendly. I never have problems getting time off for family commitments.

Open and helpful culture. Everyone is willing to help out

Cons

Salaries and benefits are average. Until recently, the healthcare options were awesome, but that changed this year. The options now are average, but NI does pay for the vast majority of the premium.

Advice to Senior Management

We have few unique benefits to tout. Healthcare used to be awesome. Now it is just slightly above average. If you are going to reduce the coverage, don't increase premiums too.

Pros

A great place for engineering graduates who don't just want to stick with a technical role. NI provides opportunities to explore your career interests in Marketing, Sales, even Operations at a very early stage of your career. You will find a lot of like-minded engineers working in a very young and energetic environment.

Cons

After your first promotion from ELP to the next level, you will find your career stagnated for a while, the company has seem challenges to maintain top talents because NI is never known for high compensation, so if the job becomes less challenge and while your mid-level managers are all 30-40 years old, it is hard to keep people around after waiting for 2-3 years for the next promotion.

Advice to Senior Management

Seriously re-consider the current compensation package, factor into location factors as well. The company is run by engineers and it has been really successful this way. However, if NI wants to make the leap to become the next great company, it needs experienced managers who can bring outside views and perspectives to the company.

Pros

- open, communicative culture
- well designed campus
- easy pace
- Austin is a good place to live
- industry standard products
- egalitarian

Cons

- technology not very cutting edge
- too many acronyms (gpbx pcib ....)
- stock symbol (nati) longer than company abbreviation (ni)
- too many sales and marketing types

Advice to Senior Management

HR: please let James truchard be. He does not have to perform at intern events.

Pros

NI is a great company to work, the pay and culture are great. The focus on the long term and is very committed to the employees

Cons

Managers are very political and play favorites. They also make it impossible to get a straight answer from them. They practice a do what I say no as I do approach

Advice to Senior Management

Dr T and the senior mangement understand what it takes to be a great company to work for and have a career

Pros

* Really is a "small company makes it big" success story.
* Wide variety of hardware and software projects, covering whatever your latest interest
* HQ is a great campus in a great city; branch offices around the world offer a chance to dip your toe in all sorts of things
* Promotion from within -- you know your competition when trying for a spot because they're mostly the same people you've worked with for years

Cons

* NI is a social network. A VERY social network. Surprisingly so for a bunch of engineers. Lots of tight friend circles, intra-company dating, that sort of thing. And that means that news spreads often through back channels, and opportunities to advance can be missed because you didn't go to a particular party to overhear that news. Luckily, it's never too late to start meeting people and forming your own back channel group.
* Lots of growing pains. The transition from small company to large has had some missteps. Nothing egregious, but annoying. Sometimes it can be hard to figure out who is the proper authority on a given topic, which leads to a lot of "better to ask forgiveness than permission" attitudes.

Advice to Senior Management

NI relies heavily on those back channels to keep it from making dumb mistakes. There is some real weakness in the formal communications between groups. As we get larger, random connections across the company will be harder to form. We either need to improve formal communications structures or do a better job mixing groups so people in disparate departments get to know each other, just like the old-timers did naturally.

Pros

Being in the field for NI is a really great experience. The independence is fantastic and field employees pretty much get to run their own business.

Cons

Let's be honest- NI isn't exactly the highest paying company. However, efforts are being made to make some changes to the way that the field sales guys are being compensated.

Advice to Senior Management

Be strong in what you really believe in. NI has a history of "management by concensus" which can sometimes be a bit disheartening. Keep the small company mentality.

Pros

The company does it's best not to lay-off employees when the economy is poor.

Cons

I was a temporary employee for 16 months

Pros

Great company to work for. Very friendly and wonder fun culture. Good management and direction of company is sound. Great company to invest in as well.

Cons

Maybe not the best pay however very satisfying job. At times there have been less options for growth but that's typically when economy was bad. NI is a growing company with many more growth options in the future.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the good work. Pay out to your employees a bit more in order to keep and maintain them.