Pros
Your direct team leader is usually awesome. Your coworkers are pretty nice, but since Garmin only hires based upon test scores, communication skills are subpar usually. They have good 401k benefits, decent vacation
Cons
Upper management is under performing. We have auto OEM which is losing a ton of money (100+ million in 2021) but then deny you on a $25 item you need for work, or complain about how they can't spare a dime more than $15 for lunch. It's like they have no financial awareness at all. They never counteroffer people leaving, since it's such a 'privilege' to work at Garmin. Let me tell you a secret, it's not. I didn't even realize how bad it had gotten till I started at another company, wow it's bad, new company HR and management is light years ahead of Garmin. Like what is business case for never doing counteroffers? So by not doing counteroffers you: a) make the company look like they don't care about employees b) automatically have to go find a replacement c) lose a huge amount of experience that you can't replace Like why? You know why most people leave Garmin? It's because Garmin penny pinches and generally doesn't care about their employees. Counteroffers would at least go partway in addressing that. Raises are always at 3%. Save the company millions of dollars? 3.5% maybe. No matter how well you do, you're not getting promoted to an important position or a big raise, it's just not happening at Garmin. After 10 years there's essentially no more career path for anyone, they designed the career path in 2011 but forgot to add enough levels unfortunately. They have flexible work, but it's 60% of the time, not 3 of 5 days. So if you take off Monday for instance, you have to be in the office for 60% of those 4 days (meaning 3 of the 4 days). All the good people left when they made everyone come back to the office. Why work in the office when you can get a raise and no commute (and a company that appreciates you) easy? Garmin keeps thinking they have the leverage when they have none. They don't value innovation here anymore. Your only incentive is not to get yelled at. HR is not great. Recruiters are actually good honestly, but the rest of the staff? They chased away the good people and the people left are heartless. People have had family emergencies, cancer, etc and need flexibility and Garmin just denies them. Someone got temporarily trapped overseas due to a passport issue and Garmin fired them for exceeding 30 days. No exceptions ever given for anything. You'd better hope you never have a life event because Garmin is not going to be there for you. There is no sick leave either, although they recently added paternity leave which was nice. Office decor is very outdated, evidently they bought a semi trailer full of carpet squares at one point and have been using them forever. Pretty much shows the lengths Garmin goes to in order to save a buck. Cafeteria is super expensive. You also can't transfer between departments without financial repercussions. Corporation is super cheap. Any type of reward like a free lunch they've found ways to eliminate to save a dollar. Work can be super boring and some departments can have lots of overtime. No cutting edge technology to work on in some departments. Year end bonus is only $300. Yep, I'm serious, $300. They used to give out up to 4 weeks salary if the company did good, now only $300 no matter how good the company did. The only good part was laughing with my friends about it, they're talking about their $10k+ bonuses and I get to tell them about my $300. It's so small that it doesn't even seem legit, like is there another corporation out there that only gives $300? Also funny is that if you think about it, Auto OEM was losing 100 million in 2021, that's like enough to give every US employee like $15k+. So Auto OEM loses enough in a week to cover the bonus pool.