Pros
National Semiconductor has great people to work and offers a fair amount of ability to move around within the company. I generally felt the working environment was always pretty good and that National has always strived to compensate people better than many companies in the area in terms of wages and benefits. It also provides its own on-site fitness center, a very nice park and excellent cafeteria services. It is hard to say however whether NSC will continue to provide these as they were changing things within the company considerably as I was leaving and seemed to be becoming much more cost conscious given the heavy debt load they accrued in recent years. I was recently told they are looking at divesting the park, which is also where the fitness facility resides and heavily cutting back on other services.
Cons
I spent many years at National and I suppose like all companies it has had its ups and downs. It is my opinion that National has lacked a superior management team at the top for the last 25 years, which is why it has been unable to find the right knobs to drive revenue growth during that time (i.e. has gone from about a $2.5B company to about a $1.2B), whereas its competitors have done just the opposite. During the last 25 years the workforce has continued to shrink from about 25,000 employees down to about 5-6000 today. The problem continually seems to be executive managements inability defining a winning vision and products that our customers want and need. National continues to undergo change today, as it seems to be trying to morph from its core competency as a IC manufacturer into a systems integrator, or at the very least a module company. I wish them the best of luck, but until this happens, I would not expect much revenue growth or employee growth to occur.