National Instruments acquired by Emerson (2023)

This is a very interesting description of group think between less experienced developers. I've never thought of it this way, but it seems to have some truth in it.

NI had a fantastic college recruiting process. They sent engineers (not HR people or recruiters) to college career fairs all across the country, often back to their own alma mater, to snag the best-and-brightest from good engineering programs. They then organized big interview days where something like 50 or 100 college applicants would be flown in to interview on Thurs/Friday and then be taken out to downtown Austin on Friday night.

Their interview process was technical, rigorous but fair, and avoided the pitfalls of pointless puzzle questions or of favoring elite credentials over abilities. And their managers, product and sales positions all started from that same pool of entry-level engineers, so even if you were interacting with someone who's title was like "Product Marketing Manager" they had a BSc in engineering, comp sci, physics, math, etc.

The end result was that you always had very intelligent and capable coworkers surrounding you every day. I left for the same reason many other posters have mentioned- by mid career, I was getting paid substantially less than I could make elsewhere.

I always considered NI best for research labs / benchtop measurements, and this acquisition seems like a poor fit because NI was pricy but with good end user support, while Emerson likes to have very expensive/little support.

I'm not sure who I would use for that purpose, I'd say that we're blessed with a huge variety of things which are of quite good enough performance and ease of use, but also with the curse of needing to deal with different vendors for different kinds of uses. I wouldn't expect most companies that sell general purpose DAQs to also sell FPGA systems for signal processing, for instance. That's odd.

But if you just mean digital and analog inputs and outputs there are so many options now that are adequate, even just an eval board for a microcontroller running a LabView firmware module can do well enough (and this route lets you escape NI better later anyway). This is a kind of cool new thing, using an Arduino or whatever as if it were an NI DAQ.

So the ecosystem is much larger, and less locked into NI software (LabView anyway).

On the other end where reliability is important, I wouldn't trust many places, but I barely trust NI. Honestly I'd be looking at Emerson if I wanted that level of assurance, but I wouldn't use that for prototyping. In a prototype I have to design it to fail safely enough rather than trying to make it foolproof.

So for prototyping there's a ton of options now, and once the prototyping is done -- if it needs to be high reliability then it's probably going Emerson or something similarly expensive anyway, and if it needs to be low cost then you'll just put it on an embedded DAC and ADC with a ARM-M0 or RISC-V or Raspberry Pi or whatever you fancy. And if you want it to be more expensive but more reliable you buy some kind of OEM module you put on your PCB so that they can be more carefully integrated while using certified analog input and output modules.

I think that ends up being three widely varying use cases, and prototyping is maybe just too easy to do in other non-LabView and non-NI-hardware systems such that the high-reliability Emerson-style market is what remains. I won't miss LabView, that's for sure.