It’s good until it’s not - Anonymous employee Garmin Employee Review

3.0
Jan 18, 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There were a few people who were genuinely nice and actually cared about you as a person and your mental health. People are mostly willing to help you if you ask.

Cons

It all probably depends on your area and who you report up to but in my experience: Lack of career advancement for individual contributors (unless they have an opening/position they need to fill or they’ll lose it). Seems to only be career advancement at the management level, so probably a pro if you’re looking for a manager role. Seems to be more managers than individual contributors. There’s an unspoken rule that you need to be on call and available 24/7. No standard processes. No sincere recognition for anything positive. Felt like I was getting fed to the wolves a majority of the time. Management never takes any responsibility for anything even slightly negative, and will pin it on anyone who they can even if it’s their own people. Everyone is just looking out for themselves, so it makes it a hard environment to collaborate in. Spent a lot of time on extra “side” projects/work that amounted to nothing (advancement wise). You’re expected to do many things far beyond your role description and will most likely not get any reward/recognition/promotion if you do it. There are many of the same meetings with the same content and managers refuse to consolidate them. They always talk about the great culture, but i never saw anything that equated to a great culture. A lot of the dev teams seemed burnt out and the quality of their work/caring seemed to be correlated with that. You’re frequently asked to “bring new ideas” and when you present your ideas to management mostly everything will be shut down, which leads people to stop trying because it’ll probably get shut down anyway. A lot of key players were quitting and manager’s response to ease concerns was “yeah, well, people quit.” Not an ounce of trying to make the remaining members feel remotely better by even just a tiny bit of encouragement. There is a strong mentality of “your best is not good enough ”. They refuse to allow people to be fully remote and you will be required to come into the office on a schedule solely for the reason to be a warm body in a seat. Also probably because they spent a ton of money on renovations during COVID and they don’t want to acknowledge or accept that it probably wasn’t the most critical thing to spend money on. I developed depression and anxiety from this job. I could probably keep going on but overall, pretty toxic environment and a lot of gaslighting.

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5.0
Jun 23, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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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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