You could do much, much worse - Anonymous employee Garmin Employee Review

4.0
Feb 2, 2013
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Health benefits are excellent and have options where you may pay little to nothing for them. 401k match is outstanding--you can take complete control of your plan, choose a self-adjusting plan, or anywhere inbetween. Upper management genuinely cares about company,how its customers perceive it, and if its associates (NOT "employees," associates) are satisfied in their work.

Cons

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.

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5.0
Jul 5, 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
Jul 1, 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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