Avantages
Wonderful culture. Brilliant, wise, and open executive leadership. Superior corporate responsibility. Awesome place to jump-start a career right out of college (or even while in college through internships), especially engineers. Very wise, fiscally conservative, long-term corporate strategy. Executive leadership is intentional about valuing employment stability and keeping organizational structure relatively flat.
Inconvénients
Pay, politics, and obliviousness to the way the rest of the world works. While people at NI generally don't get hung up on titles or superiority, career advancement seems based more on one's social circles and being an extrovert than based on performance/skills. Hiring is definitely focused on fresh-out-of-college talent, and the flat organizational structure prevents career growth for experienced pros. While it may seem nice to try to de-emphasize job titles, the fact is the rest of the world goes by resumes and the titles you put on them. NI prides itself on the "NI Way," which means its tight culture, etc., and it is very nice in general, but it often seems that NI is unaware of the way things are done in the rest of the professional world, at least as far as managers go, especially if those managers got their start at NI and have never worked elsewhere (which is common). Pay is below industry average, and raises are miniscule. While executive management is brilliant at establishing vision and valuing employees, middle and lower management seems cliquish and disorganized. But overall, if you value work-life balance, a positive, fun work culture, want to jump-start your career, NI is the place. If you're an experienced pro, don't get starry-eyed just because of the Great Place to Work accolades, negotiate your offer and don't expect big raises, and practice your social skills.