Good place for embedded software engineers - Anonymous employee Garmin Employee Review

3.0
23 Mar 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Garmin makes a lot of interesting consumer products. Benefits are pretty good. They are a large company in a variety of markets so there are a lot of opportunities for internal transfers.

Cons

Garmin lacks vision and focus. Garmin doesn't know what product to build so they build a lot of similar products which is inefficient and time consuming from an engineering perspective and confusing as hell from a customer perspective. Garmin is a hardware company and they are probably a pretty good place to work if you are a hardware engineer or you like doing embedded software on a proprietary platform. Garmin doesn't understand how to manage modern software platforms like web and mobile so if you work in those areas you will feel like the tail is wagging the dog. In other words the hardware products that Garmin sells generates all the revenue and so web and mobile teams have to do whatever the product teams want even if that means committing software suicide.

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5.0
23 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great work life balance Good people

Cons

Lower salary compared to market

3.0
3 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good benefits and work life balance. It's a good culture and I've never worked at a place where your immediate peers are this helpful and pleasant to work with, even across teams and offices. If you want to just come in and do just what is required for your job and go home with the knowledge you have a stable job, this is the perfect place to work. I'd only recommend working here if you just want a job, but don't care about a career.

Cons

There is poor career advancement, especially if you aren't male. Leadership does not care about leading people. The RTO has made working here less appealing. The excuse that you can't collaborate unless you are in the same building makes no sense when you work with people in 6 different countries. It is about control and appearances, all due to incredibly poor senior leadership strategies. The pay is also low and so is the quality of the software you work on. Leadership likes to talk quality, but they like fast and cheap. They will not support you in actual software quality nor implement changes to improve it. The same issues happen over and over without improvement.

10
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