Garmin reviews

3.7

71% would recommend to a friend

(1,837 total reviews)
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Clifton Pemble

76% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

Garmin has an employee rating of 3.7 out of 5 stars, based on 1,837 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Garmin employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Manufacturing industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
1.0
Jul 19, 2018

To all women- stay away

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

To be honest, it is pretty grim. If you want to coast though, this is your place.

Cons

I implore all women considering Garmin, look elsewhere. In my division of ~500 people, I can count on one hand the number of women that have direct reports. I've lost count of the number of times I've been the only woman in a meeting and been asked to take notes or assigned the "secretary" tasks that come out of it (I have multiple engineering degrees, its not my job). I spend a lot of time being talked over and down to about my area of expertise by men with less experience. They seem to think I'm pretty skilled at scheduling meetings for them really, really want me to take care of the social events, because as one fellow engineer told me "engineers aren't good at that stuff, you should do it." Save yourself a lot of pain and suffering and just watch Mad Men instead. Sexism aside, the only way I can describe the culture is blame-based. The people that report problems get publicly shamed, so everyone has learned to not share when things aren't going well. I've seen managers not speak on a subordinates or peers problems until in a public forum, where they pile on with everyone else. There is a big disconnect between management and the frontline employees and when management do try to solve a problem, their solution is to write a new process down and consider it fixed. They'll try to tell you the benefits are good, but they are really pretty standard. They'll act like the stock purchase plan makes up for the below average industry pay (even lower if you are a woman, surprise!), but Garmin stock isn't exactly rocketing these days. PTO is based on tenure (3 weeks to start) and you don't get any sick days.

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Garmin Response
7y
At Garmin, we are working hard to maintain an inclusive environment and have a concentrated effort on attracting and retaining women within the organization. As an organization, we understand diversity and inclusion helps foster an environment of creativity and innovation. Garmin offers a mentoring program for women – the Women’s Business Forum. WBF is designed to provide support and help female employees grow at Garmin through opportunities to attend networking events, professional development training, community outreach, mentoring, book clubs, and more. To expand on recruiting women to the organization, we have placed emphasis on national diversity events and conferences: - Grace Hopper Anita Borg Institute – Women in Technology - NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Awards - Women Hack - Society of Women Engineers (Local and National) - Latina Girl Scouts SPARK Events - Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day - Women in Aviation Conference - Women of Aviation Week We continue to work hard to build and strengthen our diversity and inclusion efforts. Your ideas are welcomed, valued, appreciated, and respected. As a current associate of Garmin, I would encourage you to share your concerns with the HR team. You are also welcome to direct inquires to DiversityandInclusion@garmin.com.
1.0
Dec 1, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

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.

2.0
Mar 17, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Nice coworkers. Medical benefits are okay.

Cons

Garmin is quickly falling behind other similar sized companies in a lot of ways, and they're going to continue having a lot of trouble retaining employees and finding replacements unless they make changes. But I unfortunately don't see that happening. It's been pretty hard watching this ship slowly sink. Just on my former team alone, we lost several brilliant people that, understandably, moved on to better opportunities. This is causing product quality to quickly deteriorate due to an ever increasing workload being dumped on to those left. They offer a 2-day WFH/3-day office hybrid split. But, there's signifiant limitations on that. They've left it up to various teams and departments to decide on who is approved to be hybrid, so in practice few will actually be given that benefit. And leadership positions are straight up not allowed to WFH at all, which will no doubt cause a lot of tension. So, in order to remain competitive with other companies to attract talent, Garmin would need to provide benefits to offset needlessly commuting into the office. Which, they don't. Compensation is also very low compared to what others are offering.

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