Garmin is a hugely insular place to work. There are five business divisions, each of which operates relatively independently of the others. Different codebases, different infrastructure. My HR recruiter did not help me navigate this maze or float my name to any other departments than those I specifically applied to. So if you're applying to Garmin, be sure to apply for several different positions/divisions.
Garmin is also not a good place to transfer to mid-career. If you have, say, 15 years of industry experience, someone with 5 years of experience will still be senior to you and/or promoted first. Seniority seems to trump all.
There's a "security by edict" approach: you're told what to change, but aren't given any manpower to do so. As a result, you could spend weeks or months making changes, only to find out that the particular security requirement in question has been postponed or rolled back entirely. Security needs to help guide people, rather than throwing the book at them.
Garmin touts that it invests in its employees, but there are no provisions for going to conferences, obtaining certifications, etc. It was looked down upon when I signed up for tuition reimbursement for a relevant class. People did not seem to be part of external user groups, follow product mailing lists, or be members of professional IT orgs (IEEE, USENIX, etc.). You see people who've been there 25 years, but haven't been pushed to keep their skills up to date.
There are lots of internal IT politics about which systems to use. In particular, there seems to be a large emphasis on writing custom software tools, even when perfectly good open-source tools already have existed for years. People just didn't take the time to research them before hauling off and writing code. This leads to a situation where you must be a software developer to manage infrastructure, and you can't readily make use of community resources.
Overall, this sort of "do-it-ourselves" mindset really seems to permeate the company. It's good when you're designing products, but for basically everything else, it's holding the company back. I can't help but feel that if Garmin were located in a different tech market, it would have a vastly different approach to its IT organization--one that is more open-minded, collaborative, and that reuses common industry tools. Needless to say, I'm pretty burned out and will likely need some time away before starting my next role. Ultimately a cool new gym and better food can't make up for being intellectually isolated.
