Garmin reviews

Salaries are far sub-par and there is little in the way of bonuses. Sometimes engineers spend months on end working long hours and never see a bonus while the company rakes in huge profits and gives huge dividends to investors. The promotion system (Engineer I, Engineer II) is a joke, there is no clear definition of how to advance.

Middle management is a mixed bag when it comes to the above. There are middle managers that genuinely think of Garmin as one and try to operate with other departments that way, and there are middle managers more concerned about protecting their fiefdoms than functioning as one company. Sometimes major changes happen that the entire company must accept and adapt to, without having prior input, because only one department required the change. It makes inter-department communication often very difficult. It's easy to get the perception at Garmin that there are two sets of rules, one for engineers and one for everyone else. This especially applies if one works in manufacturing. We grew so fast from 1995 to 2005 that there are two separate and distinct cultures depending on when one was hired, one that knew the small scrappy company and one that knows only the "big" company, and they often collide--especially in high-turnover departments like Product Support.