Not surprising. I worked at NI for my first job out of university and developing software there was so painful
Why do you think that is?
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.
so annoying!
* 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
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.
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 = No Income. Keep in mind, they're also HQ'd in Austin, TX, which is essentially the most expensive city in Texas.
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.