Come here for the people and the culture, nothing else
Pros
The people, culture and 401K seem to be the main factors for retention at Garmin. It's truly a wonderful place to work and everyone rallies around each other when they need it, inside and outside of work. The 401K benefit is around 12.5% when maxed out which is incredible. The discounts help if you're a fan of the products, and most likely you are if you're coming to Garmin - hence the people, everyone typically is passionate about what they do.
Cons
There's a growing disconnect between Garmin and their customers. Market share doesn't erode overnight, it's lost one customer at a time. Vertical integration is great for the business but not for your career health. From IT to embedded, you'll spend the majority of your time on tooling and frameworks that don't apply outside of Garmin. Inflexible hybrid WFH policies, "3 days in office, 2 at home" with exceptions such as strongly discouraging WFH on Monday or Friday, when traffic is always the heaviest. Career progression is both well defined by YOE, and subjective based on your manager at the same time. Zero in-office perks to entice works back to the office, the cafe is mediocre at best and the average meal can be more than $10 instead of free, like most big tech. So much of the inefficiencies within Garmin are self imposed processes, it sometimes operates like a large bureaucracy with layers of red tape.
