Pros
Depending upon manager, NI can be reasonable when it comes to tending to family emergencies. In addition, again depending upon the manager, NI can be flexible when it comes to working from home. However, this is not the company norm.
Cons
1. The highly regarded "culture" is cutting NI through it's core and rendering it useless in promoting growth. 2. It's a cult like mentality where those experienced from the outside are frowned upon as stated by the head of HR. 3. If you aren't an engineer, forget about any real career aspirations into product management or any other high level position,like a VP, where business decisions are made. 4. Every man for himself is the mentality at NI. NI loves young - just out of college engineers which is great for R&D. However, engineers from the feared"outside" of NI are not treated with respect but with suspcision. 5. NI does everything they can to discourage objective decision making and in the end burns out it's mostly highly productive resources. 6. NI - Dr. T, doesn't want to do lay offs unless shutting down a site. However, this approach to keep everyone on board - inspite of continued poor performance by a resource - puts a hugh burden on other resources, managers etc. It maybe a good selling point in a down economy but as an employee you give up career growth which in the end hurts your chances for getting another job outside of NI because you don't have the most recent skills required to do the job. 7. NI is cheap. They refuse to consider human resource as a cost to a project. So, human resources can work 60 to 80 hours for over a year and are maybe compensated with 2 days off. Bonuses are meager and few and far between (even when the economy was good). In summary, don't work for NI unless you are an engineer just recently graduated from a top engineering school.
