Garmin Software Developer reviews

3.8

65% would recommend to a friend

(228 total reviews)
avatar

Clifton Pemble

75% approve of CEO

52% positive business outlook

Software Developer employees have rated Garmin with 3.8 out of 5 stars, based on 228 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Developer professionals have a good working experience there. Garmin is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Developer professionals compared to other employers within the Manufacturing industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

228 reviews
2.0
Mar 17, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Stable Pay Stable Benefits No Dress Code

Cons

Everything pertains to aviation: First: You are brought in with basically zero training. Garmin uses a variety of homebrewed tools and frameworks, and you'll be expected to learn them all with the very little documentation provided. You can ask your teammates/mentor for help, but they'll be so busy, that it will be hard to aquire time from them. Certain teams work their employees so hard, that you can feel how miserable their lives are with every conversation. Next, you'll be given asinine requirements from your manager. I tried to partake in some of the social groups at Garmin(as I was new to KC), and my manager harped on me for not being in my chair for ~90% of the work day. I never felt treated like such a child. Personally, I found the work dull and boring. I can't sit in a chair for 9 hours 5-6 days a week without becoming extremely burnt out. You'll hear that term thrown around a lot, by the way. Everyone is talking about burn out. My current job, I have yet to hear one person say burn-out. Good luck getting promoted. Upward mobility is like winning the lottery in this company. Everyone is to complacent with the 3 promotions they'll receive during their career here. Everyone is complacent with the 1-3% raises you'll get every year. Everyone is complacent with $200 bonus and the $20 gift card to Walmart. This job has way too much stress to warrant such lack of career development.

3.0
Feb 7, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Garmin is the kind of place that you go to work when you want something safe, with adequate pay, decent benefits, and a 40 hr a week load because your life emphasis is outside the workplace. The headquarters location in suburban Kansas City ironically mirrors this sentiment. A suburban utopia of highly rated schools and from a national perspective- relatively affordable housing opportunities make an ideal location for the family oriented employee.

Cons

Garmin is not the place to work if you want to light the world on fire, want upward mobility, financial reward or future opportunity. The future prospectus is murky as portable navigation devices have fallen out of favor, forcing Garmin to look to emerging and third world markets to make up the slack, shift the identity of the company to a fitness-oriented focus, and deal with the ever increasing competition in what was historically their exclusive space from giants such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. If you're awesome and you know it, look elsewhere.

2.0
Feb 1, 2015

Aviation Software

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.

Viewing 178 - 180 of 228 Reviews

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