4 ms·

Sounds interesting. Can you elaborate?

Kirby64 2y ago
NI has a nickname in the industry: NI = No Income. Keep in mind, they're also HQ'd in Austin, TX, which is essentially the most expensive city in Texas.
- etrautmann 2y ago
  Interesting, I’ve ended up spending thousands on NI hardware at my last four jobs
  - Kirby64 2y ago
    The cost of their hardware and software is unrelated to the salaries they pay their employees.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      That goes for every business. Their purpose is to increase shareholder value, not employee wages. The last part only happens due to market dynamics forcing them to, but they'd gladly pay engineers minimum wage if they could.
  - positr0n 2y ago
    A lot of their products are relatively far into the long tail of hardware projects. Enough demand in the market that it makes sense for a company to design and build them, but not so many units sold that all those design costs are easily amortized away.
etimberg 2y ago
Some highlights that I remember include: * One project where the CI took something like 48 hours * Trying to apply waterfall hardware engineering processes to software development * Mostly hiring devs fresh from university so there was a ton of group think due to a lack of new ideas * Low salaries so most of the devs left once they got promoted beyond a junior level
- josh-sematic 2y ago
  I had similarly painful experiences. Also the project I was on was mostly in maintenance mode, with mostly junior engineers out of college on it who had little experience with that particular code. Not many tests. Lots of code archaeology and "I'm crossing my fingers I didn't just break some subset of the enormous configuration space of this tool"
  - etimberg 2y ago
    The code archaeology was probably the most fun part for me but I had so much free time to do that because my projects were mostly maintenance as well
    - positr0n 2y ago
      Fun NI archeology story. When I was there in the early 2010s, I met a greybeard hardware engineer with a big chip mask poster on his cube wall. He told me they lost the schematics and all documentation to one of their first timing chips that was used in lots of products. They ended up calling the manufacturer and asking for the mask image back, and any question anyone had had to be reverse engineered from the mask.
  - jolt42 2y ago
    Did they leave and go to CrowdStrike?
- sidewndr46 2y ago
  You forgot "cuts the salary of everyone each year, ensuring anyone who can update a resume finds a new job"
  - etimberg 2y ago
    Never had that experience while I was there, but about a year after I left the entire office I was in was closed and everyone laid off
  - 2y ago

NI has a nickname in the industry: NI = No Income. Keep in mind, they're also HQ'd in Austin, TX, which is essentially the most expensive city in Texas.

etrautmann 2y ago
Interesting, I’ve ended up spending thousands on NI hardware at my last four jobs
- Kirby64 2y ago
  The cost of their hardware and software is unrelated to the salaries they pay their employees.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    That goes for every business. Their purpose is to increase shareholder value, not employee wages. The last part only happens due to market dynamics forcing them to, but they'd gladly pay engineers minimum wage if they could.
- positr0n 2y ago
  A lot of their products are relatively far into the long tail of hardware projects. Enough demand in the market that it makes sense for a company to design and build them, but not so many units sold that all those design costs are easily amortized away.

etimberg 2y ago

Some highlights that I remember include: * One project where the CI took something like 48 hours * Trying to apply waterfall hardware engineering processes to software development * Mostly hiring devs fresh from university so there was a ton of group think due to a lack of new ideas * Low salaries so most of the devs left once they got promoted beyond a junior level

josh-sematic 2y ago
I had similarly painful experiences. Also the project I was on was mostly in maintenance mode, with mostly junior engineers out of college on it who had little experience with that particular code. Not many tests. Lots of code archaeology and "I'm crossing my fingers I didn't just break some subset of the enormous configuration space of this tool"
- etimberg 2y ago
  The code archaeology was probably the most fun part for me but I had so much free time to do that because my projects were mostly maintenance as well
  - positr0n 2y ago
    Fun NI archeology story. When I was there in the early 2010s, I met a greybeard hardware engineer with a big chip mask poster on his cube wall. He told me they lost the schematics and all documentation to one of their first timing chips that was used in lots of products. They ended up calling the manufacturer and asking for the mask image back, and any question anyone had had to be reverse engineered from the mask.
- jolt42 2y ago
  Did they leave and go to CrowdStrike?
sidewndr46 2y ago
You forgot "cuts the salary of everyone each year, ensuring anyone who can update a resume finds a new job"
- etimberg 2y ago
  Never had that experience while I was there, but about a year after I left the entire office I was in was closed and everyone laid off
- 2y ago