Garmin Reviews

Pros

great benefits, three weeks PTO in your first year, very clean warehouse and decent equipment.

Cons

If you are looking to move up in the company it will not happen at Garmin. You have to live with your starting pay due to very small yearly raises.

Pros

Location is good if you don't want to live downtown. Corporate culture and work environment is good for self motivated engineers. Benefits are good.

Cons

Average salary has generally been claimed to be a little bit on the low side as compared to similar jobs.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to focus on recruiting and retaining the best and most capable engineers. Focus on mentoring and passing on the Garmin culture to new employees.

Pros

Great Benefits that made the company famous, company has a strong health-oriented environment and is continuously tries to upgrade its offerings

Cons

Horrible Pay that is typical for a company with great benefites, however, Benefits are slowly going away and wages are not getting any better

Advice to Senior Management

Incredibly low morale among employees due to lack of growth opportunity, rediculously low pay, and dwindling pay

Pros

Very stable. Very low dress code. No pressure to perform.

Cons

VERY low pay or increases. Yearly pay increases are below cost-of-living.

Advice to Senior Management

increase yearly pay % increases

Pros

Paid health care
Relaxed dress code
Friendly people

Cons

Extremely poor HR- no professionalism. No brains. It's a sorority.
Extremely poor middle mgt. They generally have no mgt experience and receive no training. Conflict resolution is nil and poor performance is protected or ignored.
No career development paths
No training opportunities for your area of expertise
From middle management on up, they are completely out of touch with what is going on with the little guys in the trenches

Advice to Senior Management

Many of your vice presidents are weak at best. Poor performance by employees (including managers) should be addressed and dealt with.

Pros

Comprehensive design experience for entire product cycle
Analog, digital and RF design opportunities
Enabled to make critical project decisions
Work in multiple discipline teams (SW, ME, EE)
Hardware quality and performance is very important to Garmin management
People are very bright and fun to work with
Garmin is an engineering company from the top down
There are not very many design specialists at Garmin. Many of the engineers are jack of all trades. This gives design engineers the opportunity to work on many different problems, sometimes even at the same time.

Cons

Best engineers are promoted to team leader and manager position.
No technical career path
HR is over-staffed and ineffective
Engineering salaries are not very competitive, working at Garmin is considered a benefit.
Executive management has trouble delegating
Executive management is very bad at training their upcoming managers. They just throw you in and say good luck.
Very little accountability when something goes wrong
Executive management has a long history of taking on too much and ignoring what is going on in the company. Nuvifone is a perfect example of how the executives were lured away from their primary responsibilities.

Advice to Senior Management

It would be good if the CEO and President would begin a comprehensive training program aimed at empowering their management staff. They do not seem to be concerned with who will replace them, just the day to day tasks. Both CEO and President micro manage nearly every task. Everyone on the executive management staff needs to learn to delegate and train their replacements. Second guessing everything your business segments do is wearing everyone out.

Pros

• Employee benefits
• Fiscally responsible
• Friendly people
• Extremely easy work environment (no pressure)

Cons

• Little to no leadership in Product Support
• HR runs too many departments in the company
• Limited to no Career Path (or employee development)
• IT Dept - Tickets are left open for 6 months or longer
• Poor customer service for Canadian & Australian customers
• Engineering refuses to listen to the end users or look at market trends – lacking innovation
• Unprofessional employees are promoted into the management positions
• Employees are hired without the proper phone or computer skills
• Focuses on symptoms instead of the cause

Advice to Senior Management

My advice to Garmin is to find middle managers who are willing to lead both in practice and by example. Leadership requires active participation - too many members of middle management are there just for the pay check. I'd also advise Garmin to include the end user in the definition of your customers instead of just the big box dealers such as Best Buy, Walmart, West Marine. etc. Adding it to a Mission Statement is one thing but actually caring about the end user is another.

Pros

A great place to work fresh out of school.
Easy and laid back for the most part.
Company expectation is generally 40 hours/week.
Some good people to work with.
Benefits are acceptable and have some nice features.
Great employee pricing on products.

Cons

Pay is very low and based on Kansas salaries.
Company thinks your biggest benefit is the right to work for them.
No promotion or advancement opportunities.
NO opportunity to get recognition or significant pay increase.
Standard 'merit' increases at review cycle are the same for everybody.
Company thinks they are innovating by integrating existing technology from other products.
Management promotion is based on the good ol' boy network.
Focuses hiring in cheaper new grads, not experienced employees.
Company has lack of trust of employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't be afraid to hire in external people, particularly into management. The company could really use some fresh thinking.
Implement position grades with salary windows.

Pros

Benefits are good and company is flexible for the most part. Company needs to contiue to be pro-active with products.

Cons

Lack of growth oportunities in most areas and no formal technical career path to follow or progress towards interanlly at Garmin.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to be pro-active with everything that is done in all aspects of the company and value employees for what they have done and accomplished.

Pros

Benefits
Many opportunities for Embedded work
The facilities are well designed for development (offices, lab areas)
Lab and test equipment excellent
Job for life if you are complacent

Cons

Tendency to retain senior/middle managers who seem to collect salary but do little else. These same individuals end up with meaningless titles and head up initiatives - read talk shops with delayed execution. When they run out of things to do, new titles created.
Titles get invented arbitrarily, reorgs frequent and lack logic. See above.
HR is overly staffed with little to do besides organize events and salaries are not competitive.
Do not expect to work on software languages and technologies prevalent in the industry
Definite not invented here attitude
Do not expect cutting edge software development tools

Advice to Senior Management

Invest in technology used in the industry, and avoid this infatuation with your internal tools.
Provide clear salary grades and career growth potential
Weed and Feed only results in the top talent leaving. It doesn't work.