Today, NI President Ritu Favre announced another round of layoffs. This time, NI employees in the Americas, Europe, and Asia will be affected. No word on the number of positions affected. Affected employees will receive an invitation tonight (US) or tomorrow to an exit interview on Thursday.
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Ritu Favre's salary varies depending on her role in different companies. As Executive Vice President & GM, Business Units at NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS CORP, she made $2,339,984 in total compensation. As a member of the Board of Directors at VALMONT INDUSTRIES INC, she made $255,000 in total compensation. Her annual base salary at another company is $425,000.
Salary.com
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@2hen Farve is a bi--h, sc--wed me out of $ 250k. She the one needs to go.
What was the Phil Hester disaster?
Seeing Starkloff commenting on people ending their NI "journey" is revolting.
He ran that fu---r into the iceberg. He's a joke and shouldn't even comment. HE'S the reason all these people are out of a job and why they're posting about how hard things are.
And there is a notion in town that all the talent left NI during the Alex/Eric disaster regime. If not during the Phil Hester disaster.
Ritu says NI's flag ship product is LabView, ok if thats the case NI's R&D investment has to be in LabView, ever since Ritu took over a product like LabView has less than 25 folks working on in, It makes about 130M USD or revenue, but no investments on it, no innovation on it (what ever investment is lip service). The product has not changed a bit. This is one end of the spectrum, No lets look at the NI Product that has the most investment which is STS, makes <50M USD of revenue, after 10 years of investment has less than 1% of market share. Ritu wont even build analytics software for STS because it has no customers other than ADI. There are partnerships forged with Teradyne etc, so the question to ask is why not ki-l STS why lay off 1000s of people just because Ritu has not strategy for growth. The result of all these mistakes are 1000s of people loose their jobs, Ritu gets paid millions a year.
In 2023 Emerson acquired NI, lets see what happened after that:-
- New ELT formed with Ritu as President, Rudy, Drita, Dan, Luke etc. This ELT was all Ritu's friends.
- Ritu talks about Software Centric Test and Measurement, but if that was core to her, she would have hired a Software GM who has had decades of Software background, but what did she do, to save her friend Rudy as Chief Of Staff she made him a GM though he has no software background and was a disaster, case an point Rudy was heading Product Management for Ritu from 2020 - 2021 and software had a disastrous performance, but thats ok lets appoint him as GM (NI can destroy her friends are happy).
- Nearly 4+ rounds of layoffs since Oct 2023. - When you layoff your R&D team how do you build a product, how do you innovate? In NI Connect 2024 they were showing innovation on dead products.
- Ritu hired Drita to lead Transportation, she has had nearly 3 years of honeymoon nothing tangible to show for, tons of acquisition's but no growth in revenue.
- Ritu's pet project is STS has less than 1% of market share but she pumps millions into it just for ADI.
All these are blunders in the last 3 years but 1000+ employees get laid off but Ritu, Rudy and Drita have a job, When a company looses 400M USD in revenue in 10months when market is doing well, its the lack of leadership at the ELT level, why do Ritu, Rudy and Drita have a job when 1000s of hardworking engineers and mangers are let go.
Whole site in Belgium got laid off and some in Germany
NI had a great team of passionate, committed engineerings, the problem is that they are run by bean counters like Ritu and Rudy, both of them have no vision, and lack experience, they don't take accountability for anything, Rudy has been a hardware guy leading software and the last 3 years and results shows. He thinks he knows it all, but the net result is nearly 0.5B of revenue loss in less than 10 months since they got the reins. It shows that if you don't have the right leadership a company with great people can go down the toilet. 1000s of people getting laid off (5 rounds since Oct 2023) due to leaders who have high egos, and are big bully's. This time they have no one to blame, these folks survive by blaming others, love to see whats the excuse this time. NI/Emersion Test & Measurement division is a sinking ship, get off as quickly as you can. I am sure even Ritu and Rudy have their resume out to executive recruiters.
I was an NI long timer and the point about lots of brilliant people remaining at NI is frankly not the case. Certainly some, but for sure outnumbered by dead weight.
There are a lot of opportunities to work in Austin that didn't exist 10 years ago. Better options. Anyone who isn't taking advantage of these is either not particularly talented or completely delusional about the potential to double their compensation. NI is a terrible risk/reward for talented people with all of the layoffs and being a subsidiary company. Nobody who is very talented would sit around and wait for the axe, the ship isn't turning around.
The only people that I know still at NI after a long tenure are Marketing people who excel at politics could never rise to the same level anywhere else (Rudy and gang) and a very small number of talented Hardware folks who have full time remote positions that are difficult to find outside of NI.
I'm sorry. There is no "NI" or National Intruments. It ceased to exist some time ago. It no longer trades on the NASDAQ. So stop using that term.
It's now a BU and a segment of Emerson. That's that. Anyone left (politicans and dead weight) is an Emerson employee.
The former company with the nice campus off Mopac was bought by serious businessmen who identified a company with incompentent leadership. And alot of people were burned by that leadership.
Not to diminish the unquestionable impact of the layoffs, but to correct the record on some of these comments here, there are still lots of brilliant talented people at NI. Not dead weight. Leadership would have to cut way more to reach site-closure levels, enough to trigger a WARN notification.
I have to add this for current employees and recent layoffs. It will be tough.
The view is that the talent left years ago and the politicians and dead weight is all that’s left.
Which is true. Accounting tricks, buying companies for revenue, crazy DEI stuff, and letting bullies run amok leads to this reckoning. It’s time to settle accounts. Sad.
NI is leaderless and visionless, Ritu & Rudy wanted everything behind offerings spent a year in 2023 on offerings no increase in revenue (or decrease in revenue) and now they want to shut down offers. Waste another year. The better question to ask is between Ritu, Rudy, Drita are these the right people to run NI, in 1 year since Eric left NI has lost 400M USD in revenue while all the competition is doing well, Why are we not laying off the leaders like Ritu, Drita and Rudy who have fat compensations, no vision and running NI to the ground. Lal/Ram hope you are watching this. These folks make excuses for their failures.
No idea how many are left, but heard it was ~15% that were laid off
How many employees are left after this round?
With no more Offering Managers and the term “offering” being retired, do you think NI will ask Bain for a refund?
Any estimate on the headcount left in R&D in Austin? Layoffs in Hungary and Malaysia? Sounded like a Bloody Thursday. Very sad to hear this. Good folks there. And some very, very bad folks too.
I'm guessing a skeleton crew of IT, Admins, and HR to process the closure of the site?
They publicly announced plans to offshore a few months ago. Everyone in software received this messaging in the form of a powerpoint slide on it. Software orgs are all planning offshoring roadmaps currently and have been for the past couple of months. This might be true for all disciplines.
definitely more projects being shifted to low cost geographies after trained by high cost workers.
I've heard they are shifting more work to low cost geographies where possible
Most people have a separation date of June 28th, probably because end of quarter.
Folks on higher priority projects may have a later separation date.
They haven't talked about shutting down the campus.
Can't imagine it makes sense to hold onto it with such low utilization, so who knows what the future holds.
Are the layoffs effective immediately? Will the site shutdown and operations shift elsewhere?
I was able to negotiate PTO payments and to push some severance into the next tax year.
Utilization of mopac c is likely far below 50%. Most people come in on Thursday and the garage only has 1 + 1/3 floors full.
That gives a whole new meaning to Emerson's motto "Let's go"
Maybe in very specific cases where you're some kind of rock star and they'd really want to hire you back at some point, so much that they'd be willing to make you happy even as they send you packing... negotiating might work. But I don't see it happening with NI/Emerson, at this juncture.
I attempted to negotiate more, because may as well try, but they wouldn't budge.
In rare circumstances it may be possible, you really need some leverage to be successful.
"Nah, I don't like that severance package. Give me more, or else I'm gonna keep working here"
Do people really think that's how it works?
Has anyone negotiated a package deal better than what's listed below?
How many people are left in Mopac C? 50% capacity? Are there still product groups?
Pretty sad how this company was run into the ground.
Package details:
All Unvested RSU/LTI payout
Max of 26 weeks severance (2 weeks per year of service with cap at 13 years)
No AIP bonus payout
No PTO payout unless required by law
No sick time payout
IT in NIC was gutted even further. Combining that with all of the security changes happening as part of integration with Emerson, expect a lot of work to slow to a crawl going forward.
President Ritu Favre in the same e-mail announced additional changes in organization to align business would be announced later in the week.