Garmin reviews

Extremely conservative. The phrase I heard often was "Garmin likes to bet on base hits, not home runs". This does result in some pros like being extremely stable through downturns, but also results in ambitious projects being turned down and frequent pushes to maintain the status quo. Not a lot of diversity. Most decision makers in the company are white males, which can (and has by their own admission) resulted in a lot of missed opportunities in some market segments. A lot of groupthink due to a culture of promoting from within the company. Cliff (the CEO) was once a software engineer and a lot of upper management started out in engineering as well. There are also numerous examples of leaders being hired from outside of the company who end up leaving because they have a tough time adjusting to the culture. The performance review process was a waste of time. Your goals were set at the beginning of the year with little to no guidance from management and then never refined or discussed again until your performance review at the end of the year. Your manager would then leave a small blurb about the goal (sometimes as short as one sentence) and that was it. Garmin is very strict about promotions until you fit their job description. The general engineering path is around 2 years to become a Software Engineer 2A/B, 5 years to become a Senior Software Engineer, and 10 years to become a Tech Lead (with even further levels available, but it is generally rare). I was told by multiple managers that despite me exceeding expectations for multiple performance cycles and already operating at the next level, I would have to wait until I hit my years of experience requirement to advance to the next level. Olathe (and generally Kansas) does not have a lot of large tech companies, so it is challenging to advance your career long term while staying in the area (dependent on tech stack). If you're committing to moving to the Olathe HQ, you should be prepared to stay at Garmin for the duration of your stay because there are not very many places to move to if you're unhappy.

- Management is resistant to change and values seniority over technical value (i.e you must "prove yourself" before you're allowed to have any ideas). - WFH policy exists but is pretty inflexible. You'll be in the office 90% of the time. - Tons of micromanagement - "Excellent performance" is defined as doing exactly what you're told as quickly as you can. - Agile In Name Only. Zero developer autonomy. - Low to no ownership over the end user experience. No cross-functionality. I've never even met the users of the project I work on. - Company focus is on churning out as many new devices as possible rather than investing in a few good ones. - You'll spend 80-90% of your time doing maintenance rather than development. - Huge amount of tech debt from an ancient inherited codebase - constant production issues. - Possibly racist recruitment? The office is disproportionately Indian. - It seems like the Software Engineers are treated as a cost center rather than a driver of value.