Salem office - great coworkers, good benefits, middling pay. - Software Engineer Garmin Employee Review

3.0
Mar 8, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I work in the software engineering dept at the Salem OR office. My coworkers are great, immediate management is pretty good (supportive, gives a fair amount of autonomy). The health benefits, 401K, stock plans are great. People are happy to help with your technical problems, friendly to new hires etc. Overall a pretty good place to work if you are OK with software dev cycle moving somewhat slowly & with lots of documentation and testing. This is critical for product safety in the aviation department, and the work itself is pretty interesting, just with more overhead than some engineers may be used to.

Cons

PTO policy is not very generous compared to many tech companies. It's especially hard for new hires to accrue time off, and your sick time comes out of the same bucket of time (about 2 weeks PTO each year for your first 5 years, I believe). Pay seems low compared to many tech companies. It might be more appropriate for the cost of living in the Olathe KS office. Not uncommon to get a salary increase of only 1% or 2% each year. Yearly bonuses are so small as to be almost nonexistent. Higher-level management in Olathe doesn't give Salem as much autonomy as we might desire. Covid policies have been hit and miss in my opinion. There was a generous covid-specific paid leave policy for the first two years, but it was sunsetted this January right when Omicron hit a lot of people. Our ability to remote work has been hampered by technical difficulties for the past 2 years, and it does not appear that remote work will be supported well in the post-covid era. Not a lot of opportunity to switch from engineering into low-level management positions. Software dev is mostly in C.

Explore other reviews about Garmin

5.0
Jun 23, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great work life balance Good people

Cons

Lower salary compared to market

3.0
Apr 3, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good benefits and work life balance. It's a good culture and I've never worked at a place where your immediate peers are this helpful and pleasant to work with, even across teams and offices. If you want to just come in and do just what is required for your job and go home with the knowledge you have a stable job, this is the perfect place to work. I'd only recommend working here if you just want a job, but don't care about a career.

Cons

There is poor career advancement, especially if you aren't male. Leadership does not care about leading people. The RTO has made working here less appealing. The excuse that you can't collaborate unless you are in the same building makes no sense when you work with people in 6 different countries. It is about control and appearances, all due to incredibly poor senior leadership strategies. The pay is also low and so is the quality of the software you work on. Leadership likes to talk quality, but they like fast and cheap. They will not support you in actual software quality nor implement changes to improve it. The same issues happen over and over without improvement.

9
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