Vantaggi
Garmin has a great leadership team and good work life balance (hours worked, not WFH). The leaders are all former engineers and understand the importance of the work. My peers and the engineers under us were all exceptional. The opportunity for movement was pretty good. Healthcare benefits are unmatched. If remote work didn't exist, Garmin would be the absolute best company to work for in KC. I would have never left if the pandemic and remote work didn't happen.
Svantaggi
Garmin is basically the place you go as a software engineer when you're good enough to get in at a Tier 1 (google, msft, apple, etc) but need to live in Kansas City for whatever reason. The work is all the same difficulty, the expectations are the same, the interview process weeds out a vast majority of candidates... but there's a big difference. I moved from mid-100k as a team lead with 10+ years at Garmin (only some as manager) to mid-500k working for one of the big tech companies, working remotely from KS. In the time since I've left, I know multiple other managers (all with 10+ YOE at Garmin) who have quit as well to go to bigger tech companies. With such an enormous salary disparity and 5% raises trying to account for a 300-400% difference, Garmin will hemorrhage its top talent over the next couple years. Other small problems: ESPP is capped at 10% of cash salary instead of the real 25k IRS limit. Force ranking of teams for compensation. Very low diversity in software group. Very bad infra, awful build systems and lots of homebrew tooling. RSU compensation is a "secret", half of it is tied to company performance, and overall value of RSUs is very low. WFH policy is 2 days a week, but not actually flexible, just a checkbox to say it's offered. Growth is slow, so opportunities are reduced above front line team lead. Never saw a second line manager or above change positions in 5+ years. I'll acknowledge that the situation is very difficult since Garmin has competed in a much smaller software market up until Covid opened things up. This is a problem most tech companies outside SF, Seattle, Austin, and NYC will have to deal with.