Pros

great company culture. Management is sensitive to your needs. Work is good. Excellent transparency within the company, few decisions come as surprises.

Cons

pay is a little less. There seem to be few tracks to move to higher management. compensation for higher working hours seem minimal.

Advice to Senior Management

- pay a little better

Pros

Great company culture, great place to learn as your first job out of college. Never had to work a day of overtime in my time with the company. Co-workers are friendly and professional.

Cons

Management treats everyone's worth as equal and does not value important talent. As a result the pay is relatively poor compared the other companies. A pay cut was instated globally even though in certain economies (China for example) the financial situation was not as dire.

Advice to Senior Management

Give employees more money! That's really what most people care about. If management don't pay what talented employees are worth, they will quickly lose lots of talented workers, as they are right now.

Pros

Very nice campus, great people, conservative approach, committed to investing in it's employees. Stable place to work, will go to reduction in workforce only as last resort.

Cons

Homegrown managment can be good thing but too much can limit innovation and perspective. Some of the "Spin" is annoying

Advice to Senior Management

At NI Engineering is important but try not to make it so obvious that non engineering employees are a secod class.

Pros

Laid-back atmosphere
Good compensation package, as the company pays government-implicted welfare expenditure on behalf of the employee.
Established work process from which young graduates will benefit.

Cons

Non-engineering employees are much less valued.
Employees outside of US headquarters will never get rated fairly performance-wise when compared to the counterparts in the US.
Immediate managers don't appreciate self-motivated team members but followers
Absence of internal promotion mechanism.

Advice to Senior Management

Value every employee as an individual human being. Employees are more than coding machines

Pros

NI is a very employee focused company. The ELP program in particular is a fun place to work with an almost frat-house like culture. Austin can't be be as far as living in a cool city.

Cons

There is a major consensus based decision making culture and the company is extremely conservative with risk. As a result, some very ambitious or entrepreneurial type personalities may get frustrated.

Advice to Senior Management

Encourage more risk taking - break down bureaucratic barriers to change and leadership. Pay slightly higher salaries. Become more self-critical internally.

Pros

First, the company cares about employees' well-being (fitness center on campus, work-life balance classes, career development classes, etc). In addition, it's less uptight than most other technology companies. There isn't a strict dress code, work hours are fairly flexible, and interns work on the same floor with the CEO.

Cons

The biggest downside, by far, is that employees are overworked. We're currently in a hiring freeze to avoid layoffs during this recession, but everyone I know is doing several people's jobs. Lots of projects are falling through the cracks as a result.

Advice to Senior Management

Dear leadership of National Instruments, you need to resume hiring again. I appreciate that you want to make sure the business is stable before doing anything that could increase costs, but you're not even replacing people who leave.

Pros

Comfortable
Low Stress compared to my previous jobs
smart people
awesome software
Upper Management has a great forward looking attitude
Middle Managment manages as if you were an adult and not a child
Decent pay
Good benefits
No Layoffs

Cons

Austin Traffic
No clear mechanism to get rid of dead wood when necessary
not much else negative to say about this

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the great work; although work needs to happen to keep your best and brightest and remove the attitude that this is a great place to begin your career. I started outside of NI; and I'm looking at NI as the place to finish my career at.

Pros

-great atmosphere
-fun people to work with
-lots of freedom
-given leadership opportunities early on
-benefits, onsite healthcare, social events, volunteer initiatives

Cons

-young, inexperienced management
-wish I had more help in career development
-not always recognized for the effort/time you put into a project

Advice to Senior Management

-allow for more vacation
-keep taking care of your employees
-keep the volunteer initiatives, social events, these are the things that keep you going in the state of the economy today

Pros

Great work/life balance.
Laid back, low stress work environment.
Seems to care about its employees.
Collegues are very nice.
Flexible working hours.

Cons

Middle Managment is useless.
Lack of working efficiency.
You could probably find higher pay elsewhere.

Advice to Senior Management

Find correct people for middle managment.

Pros

Great work/life balance
Plenty of opportunity for growth
Laid back, low stress work environment
Seems to really care about its employees

Cons

You could probably find higher pay elsewhere.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep taking care of your employees.