The perfect place for the less ambitious career path.
Pros
Incredible 401k match. I have yet to see a tech company get anywhere near it. Great work life balance. I never saw anyone (engineering or management) ever working over 40 hours a week and the building would be pretty empty at 5pm every day. Great horizontal job opportunities as an engineer. If you are working in one tech stack and want to move to another, there is likely another opening somewhere else in the company you can switch to. A lot of responsibility and valuable experience from day one. If you're starting your career and want to have the stability of a large corporation while also getting opportunities to work like a startup this is a great place to be.
Cons
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.
