Solid Midwest Company | Great Products | Meh pay - Software Engineer II Garmin Employee Review

4.0
28 Jul 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

THE PEOPLE! My team has become a little family to me even though I've never met any of them in person yet. Great WLB though YMMV based on your team. Only worked late-night hours or weekends twice in 2 years & both times were personal choices that my manager tried to talk me out of. Love the fitness/wellness wearable product space. Really interesting data to dig into & feels good to support products that help people live happier & healthier lives. Really great 401k match (although Garmin's contribution vests over 5 years). Great medical - covers my wife and I under a HDHP/HSA at absolutely no cost to me. Garmin also contributes to your HSA annually. Big emphasis on career goals & helping you achieve them. Received 2 cost-of-living adjustments that seem to happen around June, though, I'm not sure that everyone receives them. Huge organization - can likely jump teams and do something completely different if you wish.

Cons

The pay is okay-to-good for the Midwest region - not competitive at all anywhere else. Small (~3%) annual raises based on merit. Things tend to move quite slowly at Garmin. Hybrid RTO: 3 days in-office, 2 days WFH. HR swears that there are no exceptions for permanent WFH....unless you've been with the company for a while but they don't talk about that. If you live within 200(!) miles of an office, policy states you MUST go in. Career progression is quite slow - need a minimum tenure of 5 years AT Garmin to be promoted from a SWE II to a Senior SWE. Culture is a bit conservative in the way that the company is a bit "old-school" & really values structure/processes. Not necessarily a bad thing, but might not vibe with some people. For the ambitious - you can easily slow down here & get complacent while you wait for your 401k match to vest or for a promotion.

Explore other reviews about Garmin

5.0
5 Jul 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Nice headquarters, good people, fun atmosphere.

Cons

Questionable C-Suite directives/policies. A lot of bureaucracy, and it's difficult to move new ideas forward.

3.0
1 Jul 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great, and I mean great benefits.

Cons

Poor local culture, everybody is in their own clicks and don't deviate from them. Not a huge amount of office friendliness. Not many team building exercises, and qa gets left out of alot. If you're not a developer, you will have a yard time socially. Coffee is the worst I've had at a company ever. Return to office was not handled right, and the wfh policies were written very vague by a local manager, but what they actually wanted was very specific and was not communicated at all(avg of 1 per month over the course of a year). This lead to a problem where I was denied a wfh request to grieve a dead pet because I used wfh 2 weeks earlier to register a new car ( that I got solely for work commute)

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