Job Title: Staff Software Engineer
Location: Austin, TX
Submitted on: 24-Nov-04
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Workplace
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| Staff Software Engineer |
NI is a very conservative company which has a great future. The work
environment is great. It's like working in a lab in college. The floor I
work on has no cubes. Just open seating where people can interact and
exchange ideas albeit in the absence of any kind of privacy. The salary
is the lower end of the Average range for a SW Engineer. The raises are
kind of perfomance based but dont expect more than 5%. The company does
throw in an occasional bonus (company performance based). Past year was
about 6% of the salary. There are two kinds of people at NI - one who
pretty much never advances and one who advances like a rocket. Recently
there has been an influx of people from Fisher-Rosemount (senior level
managers/executives) who have started promoting their favorites and the
people they have referred and hired. Probably doesn't sit well with some
of the old timers. Nevertheless, it's a very young and cool company to
work for. Benefits (health, 401K, employee assistance) are great. Most of
the people they hire are straight out from College so the people are
young. Forget about meeting any women in engineering. The only women
you'll see are tech writers, admins, and an occasional marketing lady who
will come down around product release time. The company has a good
voluteering program as well. NI is like a cult. Once you love it, you're
not going to leave the company.
Note for Application Engineers: Don't let them sweet talk you in the
Engineering Leadership Program. The ELP sounds cool and they make it
sound like you're a consultant and all the works, but at the end of the
day you support customer calls and do a scrapped project which a sw
engineer didn't have time to do. ELP people also try to go to Marketing
and Sales. So ELP is a good channel if you want to get into the Marketing
and Field Sales. I know a lot of ELP "Engineer" who are not happy with
the situation. They were told that after the 18 month rotation program
they would get a choice to get into R&D, Marketing, Sales etc. But guess
what, these positions are limited and so a few make it into other
departments. Some ELP people have been here for a while and still do
phone/email support.
Tech Writers are cool and have a lot of influence on the culture. Be on
their good side else you're going to have a hard time when they're
writing tech reports for your development applications. But the tech
writers are cool Democrat loving folks who encourage everyone to vote and
claim a donut/bagle in exchange for a "I Voted" sticker.
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