I did an initial phone interview with Garmin in March 24. To be fair, Garmin is a great place to work and has a great culture and I may consider working there in the future. I am a non-traditional student who has 2-1/2 years of added up full time internships, I went back and got my Masters degree and have 2 solid publications at good conferences. At the time of the interview I was 2 months away from being 4 years doing cutting edge research at a national laboratory where I have been at the senior level for 2 years. I applied for a job that wanted 5 years of experience or a combination of education and experience. They setup a phone interview with me so I assumed that I had met that threshold. During the interview I was told that all that would be considered was that I had 3.5 years of work experience, and that I would need to be hired in at software level 2 and work for a couple of years to make senior level. This is just a preparation for anyone applying for a similar job who didn’t just get an undergraduate and then worked somewhere for 5 years. You probably don’t qualify for the job. My friend has his PHD, and has worked as a Senior Architect at NVIDIA for 4 years now, and he is probably not qualified to have a coveted senior level position at Garmin. Sorry to break into a rant. Seriously though, I have done 2 internships there (which they don’t care about) and the employee culture is second to none, so if you fit their mold I would recommend.