Aviation Software - Software Engineer Garmin Employee Review

2.0
Feb 1, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good work-life balance. Decent salary for the area. Decent benefits. I hear good things about the non-avation-segments at garmin (Personal Navigation Devices, fitness, outdoor, marine).

Cons

Aviation is necessarily slow. Be prepared to work with tools that are well over 20 years old, mostly home grown. Most of management is made of former engineers. Unfortunately, most of them started as EEs and do not understand software. Most believe C is the ideal language for any and every problem faced in the field (actually, a few admitted to me they'd prefer to develop our customer facing GUIs in assembly language). You'll frequently get pulled of of your project for weeks at a time to help other teams test their code. This mostly means getting code coverage. There are very few opportunities for learning. Management makes no attempt to keep you up-to-date with the happenings of computer science or the latest tools/technology for engineering software. I can't recommend getting a job in Garmin's aviation segment unless you're prepared to spend your career there. You won't acquire very many marketable skills.

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5.0
Jun 30, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

They have a great culture.

Cons

I don't have cons to list.

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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