Pros
Stable employer Good work-life balance Great experience and good projects Skills learned here open doors in the future (outside of NI.....)
Cons
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.