9 ms·

Garmin Connect team asked to relocate - this is how they declined

281 points by cullenking 17y ago

cullenking 17y ago
This seemed pretty interesting in that I could not recall another example of an entire development team leaving at once. Not to mention their way of putting themselves back on the market is interesting and humorous to say the least. Does anyone else have any examples of entire development teams leaving at once and offering themselves for hire? Seems like a great way for the competition to snap up talent.
- ciscoriordan 17y ago
  They're in California too so they didn't have non-competes. I bet if they went to Kansas they would have had to sign them.
  - jamesbressi 17y ago
    I'll let you in on a secret. You don't need to be in California to not worry about "non-competes". An employer rarely ever holds an employee to it; it is rarely ever upheld in court; they are just a deterrent. You cannot lawfully stop someone from gainful employment. The only time you will ever see a non-compete become an issue is if it is an executive, and even then it is rare. You can stop someone from disclosing trade secrets, that is why most companies do a "non-compete / non-disclosure agreement". But, again, the non-compete part is about as enforced as the "do no remove label" on your mattress ;)
    - hga 17y ago
      As a threat they're pretty effective at killing successful startups before they start up. I've directly experienced this sort of thing twice (well, I knew better than to sign them but others had). Note that the lawsuit isn't going to be filed unless you're successful (or starting to be), upon which you're in for a world of hurt. Who wants to invest in a startup where success is going to earn that sort of "reward"?
    - cookiecaper 17y ago
      A company I used to work for is suing one of its ex-executives for starting a similar company after he was fired. I am interested to see how it turns out. The old bosses are of course telling everyone that they're going to win, but as you've noted, that goes against traditional wisdom and is probably just for psychological effect.
    - sshumaker 17y ago
      Non-competes can be enforced (even in California) if you are a founder and get bought out. I've seen a non-compete enforced on a normal employee in Virginia - someone left a tech company that did graphics visualization to do graphics programming at a game company. While he probably would have eventually won the suit, the new company defended him - eventually settling for like 60k.
- earle 17y ago
  Actually this happens very frequently when companies are acquired into larger more stagnant environments (or as Peter Lynch would label 'de-worisifcation'). It's not uncommon at all, and generally a good example of when these employees lockups or vesting has either completed, or reached an acceleration. If Garmin wanted to move these people, they should have done so during the acquisition.
  - snagage 17y ago
    Peter Lynch labeled "de-worisifcation" as companies, for the sake of diversifying, heading into markets that have little relevance to their core business. It doesn't really apply here.
- vl 17y ago
  Original Windows NT team with Cutler leading it was hired by MS when they left DEC (or was hired and then left DEC?).
- brown9-2 17y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Ward http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Ward
- daleharvey 17y ago
  didnt the jruby team leave when bought by sun and start engineyard?
  - jim-greer 17y ago
    No, Engineyard was already around and was cool enough to give them jobs working on open source. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/jruby-team-leaves-sun-joins-engine-yard.ars http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/jruby-team-l...
benofsky 17y ago
Feels very unprofessional to me, really the sort of people you want to hire? Nothing wrong with not wanting to relocate but Garmin clearly didn't want to relocate just to annoy them, there were obviously organisational, cost or other business reasons to.
- CamperBob 17y ago
  (Shrug) I grew up in that part of the country, and left for a reason. Life's too short to spend it around people who think Jesus rode a dinosaur to work. Sorry if you disagree, but unless you're a robot, professionalism only goes so far.
  - Xichekolas 17y ago
    In all fairness, I grew up about five miles from the Garmin headquarters, and most people in that area don't believe Jesus rode a dinosaur to work (that would be in Wichita). However, Olathe is a town of suburbs and schools and not much else. I wouldn't want to move back there, period, let alone from SF.
    - mturmon 17y ago
      Same here, and this rings true. "Nice" is what you get, and nice has its limits.
    - RK 17y ago
      Is that really the perception of Wichita? I would have said Topeka. (Most) All of the crazy abortion protesters are from out of town. (I lived in Wichita at one point long ago.) I'll add that some of the parts of Kansas I've been to seem very nice if you want to raise kids, or just relax, although I wouldn't want to stay there long term.
      - Xichekolas 17y ago
        I almost threw Topeka in there, but I wanted to keep it simple. I know a lot of decidedly cool people from Wichita... but I also know quite a few crazies.
hga 17y ago
I see that Garmin still does not treat its engineers well. For a number of years my father was the business manager for a group of microwave engineers in Olathe, Kansas, strangely enough (only a few hours north from SW Missouri). After that team failed to win a contract for some sort of JDAM precursor (I think, my father is not a techie) they broke up and their top dog was one of the first hired by the founders. Let's just say that the founders weren't terribly generous with employee stock allocation....
- hyperbovine 17y ago
  You lost me. The founders of Garmin had a killer idea, well ahead of its time, and they're terrible people for not lavishing the resulting riches on some lucky schmo who happened to be a talented electrical engineer living in Kansas at the time? You fail to appreciate that, while many people could have done the same job as your father's friend, it took a singular amount of vision and balls to build a company around a satellite network which wouldn't even be functional for another 4 years. If GPS failed, got axed by the gov, whatever, those guys would have been ruined while said friend would have walked away scot-free. People always seem to forget these points when bemoaning how undercompensated engineers--who after all, do all the "real" work--are.
  - amackera 17y ago
    You forget that their "singular vision and balls" would be useless if no engineers every actually implemented it. The point of stock allocation is to get people to do the work that needs to be done, and it's risky because at the time of hire the engineer doesn't know if the idea will be successful. Generous stock allocation, in my mind, is a token of good-will to the engineer and a recognition of the importance of the engineering phase of the project.
    - abossy 17y ago
      If the engineer felt it was a bad deal, I'm sure he wouldn't have taken it.
mkinsella 17y ago
Well this is certainly disheartening as I'll be moving to Kansas City in a few months with my girlfriend as she attends medical school... My job hunt begins soon and all I'm hearing is negativity about KC.
- tdm911 17y ago
  well, i hear there are some jobs opening up at garmin.
- ggchappell 17y ago
  > ... all I'm hearing is negativity about KC. Which most likely comes from people who have never lived there. I think you can take it with a grain of salt. -- Someone who has lived there, but doesn't right now
- whalesalad 17y ago
  I'm a freelancer somehow surviving in Honolulu right now. It's expensive as hell. You'll figure it out! One cool thing to look forward to... Django was birthed in Kansas! I'd love to be surrounded by Django/Python jobs!
- Xichekolas 17y ago
  One place to check out in your job hunt is Perceptive Software. A lot of the really good people I knew from my undergrad days (I went to KU, which is about 40 minutes from KC) ended up there. They have a dodgeball court, and seem to try and be a fun place to work. Another popular option is Cerner. From what I have heard they have good pay and benefits, but expect lots of hours. Whatever you do, don't work for Sprint. They employ a ton of people in the area, but there is a running joke that the halflife of a job at Sprint is about nine months. They are constantly hiring and laying people off, and the people they lay off seem to be totally arbitrary.
- jimduey 17y ago
  I live within a mile of Garmin HQ. Kansas City is a very different town from SF, but it is a great place to live. Especially if your going to be raising a family.
- 17y ago
tbgvi 17y ago
On one hand, Garmin probably got what they wanted. Moving a whole office from San Francisco to Kansas seems like a passive aggresive way of downsizing. On the other hand, they probably weren't exactly expecting this reaction. And I have a feeling they aren't gonna like this. Well played ex-Garmin team, well played.
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  My hometown is Olathe, Kansas, Garmin's world headquarters. It is a really, really great town. These people are missing out on a very good opportunity. :)
  - kordless 17y ago
    Yeah, your winters blow though. I should know, I lived in Oklahoma for 40 years. I'd much rather be out here with the mild weather, and computer nerds (of which I'm one).
  - gridspy 17y ago
    To be separated from their friends, family and networks?
    - cookiecaper 17y ago
      More like they're missing an opportunity to make a whole new network of friends and family. If you work at Garmin, you'll meet a lot of smart people, so you'll have smart friends. Olathe is a much better place to raise children than San Francisco imo. Olathe is recognized as a pretty dope place; see http://www.olatheks.org/Council/Awards http://www.olatheks.org/Council/Awards , notably "Money Magazine ranked Olathe as America's 11th Best Place to Live noting the city's growth and major employers." I recognize that it's difficult to leave old friends and acquaintances, but it's also a great positive opportunity to make new, geographically-distributed networks. People relocate all the time. My family was brought to Kansas by a relocation from Florida and it was a very good thing for us, though of course when someone says "hey buddy why don't you come move to Kansas" it doesn't sound that attractive. Frankly, that's part of the reason it's important to go; these people have some prejudice against the place, but they haven't tried going there. It's a good place with just as many modern accouterments as any other. It's in one of the richest counties in the nation but has a pretty low cost of living. It is not the rural farm-town Kansas of lore. Obviously some people have compelling personal reasons to stay in SF, and that's fine. But it's highly unlikely that all of them have such reasons, most are probably just Kansas haters. :(
_delirium 17y ago
I like this idea on the whole, but isn't it using a bit too much of the branding/trademarks/etc. of the company they left? You can make factual statements about your former work, like "I used to be part of the Garmin Connect team", but this is verging on taking the name with it, with a no-longer-Garmin-affiliated organization still calling themselves the "Garmin Connect team", using Garmin Connect material (logos, demo videos, etc.) extensively on their site, etc. As a now ex-Garmin set of engineers, they can't really advertise their services using Garmin's name, though it can be listed as relevant experience.
- gojomo 17y ago
  The Garmin logo only appears in example screenshots; referring to their former employer by name is unavoidable, as on a resume. The Garmin-derived name ("gcteam") could be a problem, but it's not clear that Garmin is (or should be) unhappy with this sort of team-marketing. Garmin may very well wish the best to their soon-to-be-former employees, and be happy for them to showcase their Garmin work/affiliation as they look for a new employer.
- CamperBob 17y ago
  It seems fair enough for them to emphasize the work they did for Garmin, but that site might go a little too deeply into exactly how it was done. I can see Garmin getting upset about the implementation details.
  - Kadin 17y ago
    Unless they're under NDA I don't really think Garmin has much of a say about that. A J2EE app server stack with AJAXy client side doesn't exactly seem like it would qualify for trade-secret protection. Making use of Garmin's trademarks (even indirectly, e.g. "gcteam") or other intellectual property, or giving out example logins to the production website ... those things seem much more problematic if the relationship with Garmin goes south. I've never heard of anyone getting slammed for discussing implementation details absent an NDA, unless there was source code or other obviously-proprietary IP involved.
- danw 17y ago
Maciek416 17y ago
I can't imagine there are that many companies out there who are making products like this. Nike+, Runkeeper, Garmin.. Who else? Having only ever used one application like this, Runkeeper, I find it interesting how similar it looks to Runkeeper's UI and feature set. If you've got a ready-made team that can make a product like this but is unwilling to leave the bay area, it would seem there aren't a lot of companies around that can absorb a whole team like this overnight. I wonder where they'll turn up.
- zackham 17y ago
  The original poster (cullen) and I are behind http://ridewithgps.com http://ridewithgps.com, so this news is particularly interesting to us
uuilly 17y ago
Garmin has been consistently clueless about how software should be developed and deployed. They are the Verizon of GIS. No surprise that they jettisoned one of their more promising projects.
- barrkel 17y ago
  Indeed. The MapSource Windows app shipped with their GPS units is an abomination - awful usability packed into a 1996-era UI that looks two notches above an MFC tutorial. The map interaction is modal - you have to switch tools to choose whether you want to pan or zoom! And the logic for road labeling leaves plenty of room for ambiguity - the labels aren't rendered along a path, but are rather in straight lines at some randomly chosen tangent to the road, and sparsely enough that you have to guess that roads near one edge of the screen still have the same names they had on the other side. The built-in updating mechanism has never worked for me - it helpfully indicates that the update "is estimated to take 3 hour(s), 38 minute(s) to download on a 56k modem". A 56k modem, for a piece of software bought in 2009, whose About box indicates a copyright of 2008.
  - uuilly 17y ago
    Hahaha. I sympathize with your rant. I have been a developer in the GIS world for 7 years and I don't own a dedicated GPS. I've always wanted one but the software and data issues leave me face-palming. Why they don't just open the standard / create an API or both is beyond me. Weekend developers writing iPhone apps have created better interfaces than these jokers.
    - enf 17y ago
      Fortunately you can pretty much ignore the Garmin software and just mount it as a USB drive to get maps on or GPS logs off.
      - uuilly 17y ago
        Interesting. Can you tell me which tools you use to work around Garmin? Mac compatible? Are their formats proprietary? Would be stoked for a solution.
temporaryacct 17y ago
Who would want to hire the kind of employee that doesn't care about causing a PR disaster? AVOID, these cats are selfish prima donnas who are not team players. Garmin isn't asking them to relocate for fun, they're doing it because they face an existential threat on the consumer side of things from the Iphone.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- potatolicious 17y ago
  And Garmin is a team player for conducting what is essentially a mass layoff? Employers can have no expectation of loyalty unless they are willing to demonstrate it in return.
  - richardw 17y ago
    The team is worrying about itself. The management have to worry about themselves, the team, the rest of the staff, the stockholders, the continued existence of the company. They are being responsible and making what is likely an incredibly hard decision. The team? Looking out for themselves, while harming further the company that put up the resources and took the risks (and maybe came up with the ideas) for creating Garmin Connect.
    - potatolicious 17y ago
      How is Garmin's resources being used, and how is the company coming to harm from all of this? That's a very specious claim unless you have information the rest of us don't. All the team is doing is saying "hey, we built this for Garmin, but now we're on our own. If you think we do good work, come talk to us!" - how are they unfairly profiting from Garmin's product? I suppose you also refuse to talk about past work at previous employers on your resume/during interviews? Otherwise you'd be guilty of the same level of unfair profit. Furthermore, Garmin's resources aren't being used. Garmin isn't paying for the server that this page is on, in fact, Garmin's not paying for any of this attempt at advertising. What's your stance on this? Should all former employees of a company disavow their previous employment and not use any showing off of previous work (publicly accessible work, mind you!) to seek more employment? As for your first claim: the company is worrying about itself, and the team is worrying about itself. Everyone is a selfish, but rational actor in this situation. Nobody is evil - and I find it disingenuous to paint the team as profiteers when you fail to do so to Garmin also.
jim-greer 17y ago
They seem like a strong team, but the list of client technologies feels more like a skills list you would put on a resume than a reasonable design choice. Is there a javascript framework they didn't use? JavaScript, XHTML, CSS Prototype JQuery Ext Scriptaculous YUI Seam JSF & Facelets RichFaces Google Web Toolkit Adobe Flex Adobe Flash Google Maps API
- slpsys 17y ago
  Hey, mootools. But point well taken.
- euroclydon 17y ago
  kitchensink.js
- cullenking 17y ago
  Yeah, but it is a resume of sorts, its what the site is about. Still cracked me up, up you go :)
- Kadin 17y ago
  > feels more like a skills list you would put on a resume Well, yeah; the website is a resume, for the entire team. It's just describing the site they built as an example of past performance. So including every framework they even looked at is, if not great, at least understandable.
andrewljohnson 17y ago
If I can get some VC funding, then this group would be a treasure trove of hires for my company.
minouye 17y ago
The icing on the cake is the Amazon affiliate links to Garmin products (see right side-bar below twitter feed: http://thegcteam.com/about http://thegcteam.com/about)
- listic 17y ago
  Don't they deserve the right to use affiliate links? I think everyone is free to use affiliate links on their site. Even more so, if you are the developer of this product.
- raganwald 17y ago
  I agree. They seem to be proud of their work and would love you to buy more Garmin stuff. If I were Garmin I'd be throwing chairs right about now, I would have de-hired a dev team and a sales force at the same time.
tmcw 17y ago
This sucks. I just uploaded my most recent run to Garmin Connect, because it's so incredibly better than Nike+ or any of that cheese. Your data is open, the frontend is super-flexible, the browser plugin is great. Sigh.
Daniel_Newby 17y ago
Wow. The back-end and business performance details they publish go pretty far into trade secret territory. Garmin probably won't sue to avoid giving off bad recruiting vibes, but I would think twice about hiring these folks.
unperson 17y ago
Where is the story about how they actually declined? All I am seeing is their team resume.
deleted 17y ago
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fseek 17y ago
Good for them. I wonder what Garmin thinks in terms of competitors now easily finding a large group of ex-employees.
marstall 17y ago
"I’ve worn many hats, and enjoyed everyone." http://thegcteam.com/team http://thegcteam.com/team yeah, that's not gonna fly in Olathe, Kansas.
tamwoods 17y ago
Here's more insight from a Garmin Connect customer with thorough speculation and confirmation from insiders - http://dcrainmaker.blogspot.com/2010/03/garmin-connect-development-team-tossed.html http://dcrainmaker.blogspot.com/2010/03/garmin-connect-devel...
bricestacey 17y ago
I was clicking through some of the team's profile and Anothony Pelosi ticked "Willing To Relocate: Yes" on his resume on dice.com. Obviously, this shouldn't be taken at face value. The truth is, no employeee is willing to relocate unless it's obviously beneficial to them, which is not always the case.
- viraptor 17y ago
  There are many, many details about relocation that cannot be told via a single checkbox. Is the relocation sponsored? Does employer provide a temporary place to live in? How far is the relocation? Is it relocation within the same state / country / continent? How many people do you know in the area of the company? I don't think this is ever a "yes/no" question.
- allwein 17y ago
  There's a huge difference between "Willing to Relocate" and "Willing to Relocate anywhere". I currently live in Pittsburgh, and I'd be willing to relocate anywhere on the East Coast between Charlotte, N.C. and Boston. Most of my family and friends are out east, so I'm not willing to relocate to the midwest or the west coast or abroad. So being willing to relocate but having restrictions doesn't make Mr. Pelosi a hypocrite
  - bricestacey 17y ago
    I don't think I ever implied he was a hypocrite. I was just pointing out that, although people are willing to relocate, it can't be taken at face value.
mistermann 17y ago
I haven't gone through the whole website, and I have no idea to what degree Garmin developers are limited by their management, But I own a Garmin XXX who knows, I bought it about 2.5 years ago, for about $750, it was very close to top of the line (text to voice, etc). I used it a bit, it worked pretty good, but as a software developer, I couldn't stop thinking about the UI failures. Failure after failure. You might think some would be caused by hardware limitations, and I always appreciated this, but even considering that, it was just unsatisfying. So, Garmin has been working on this for years, they are up to version who knows what....and then google comes out with their navigation program on Andriod....it is night and day, despite this being like version 6 (I'm guessing) for Garmin vs Version 0.5 for Google. Yes, Google has some architectural advantages that Garmin doesn't, so they can offer some amazing advanced features, but for me it's the small things that make the difference...like, does using your software make any sense? I wish these guys the best of luck, assuming they're been unhappy with how things have been for years, but if they they their work of 2 years ago was "good", I'm sorry, you guys should really be in a different profession.
- huhtenberg 17y ago
  These are Garmin Connect guys. They are not responsible for the actual devices, but rather for some sort of a social web overlay on top of the devices.
naqeeb 17y ago
I think that they should use to as an opportunity to launch a consulting company focused on webapps. I've not used Garmin connect but some of the features look promising enough that other websites would benefit.
richardw 17y ago
Yeah, because I want to hire someone who will use my resources to get themselves hired elsewhere. It's like a girlfriend using my money to put up a profile on a dating site.
- richardw 17y ago
  Downvotes. I guess the talent is feeling particularly precious today. Kids: when you start hiring people, maybe you'll change your mind. edit: And checkout http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197891 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197891 - this is your uber talent who deserves special treatment during a recession?
plasticbuddha 17y ago
WTF, Garmin... The real issue for me as a long time sports user of their products is, if this causes problems with garmin connect (like I expect), I will finally be fed up with their products. I've had nothing but disappointment with Garmin's commitment to their products until Connect came out. I hope this isn't the last stupid move of a failed company.
- cullenking 17y ago
  Garmin makes fairly solid devices (they have their flaws, but in general work well), however I feel you on their software. It's a nightmare, as any person who has used Garmin Training Center or Mapsource can tell you. If you are really fedup with connect, try out our service at http://ridewithgps.com http://ridewithgps.com. We offer much of the same stuff they do and more.
randomstring 17y ago
The team fails to mention that the deployment of Garmin Connect was over a year late and the migration from motionbased.com (which Garmin bought) was a total disaster. It looks like the motionbased.com blog and forums have been taken down. That makes it hard for those who didn't go through that hell, like I and many others did, to appreciate just what a total cluster fsck the transition was. The new site, while much prettier with all its shiny web 2.0-ness, is functionally on par with the site it replaced. Here is a cached forum link talking about how the December 2008 launch is slipping. http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:YnEfNC3lDnwJ:forums.motionbased.com/smf/index.php%3Ftopic%3D10744.0+connect+motionbased+migration&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:YnEfNC3lDnwJ:forums.moti...
- cullenking 17y ago
  Yeah they definitely lagged from what I can see, but if they are accurate in their statements of 45,000 logged activities a day, that's a TON. To put it in perspective, a single XML log file from my Garmin GPS bike computer is around 200-300kb for a 30-40 mile ride. Imagine that infrastructure buildout! Not defending a slow release schedule, but it's not "trivial" after working in this industry for the last couple years. That, and any corporate structure slows a development team down considerably. Nice dig for the cache, thanks for the info :)
  - djb_hackernews 17y ago
    This is coming from the confused part of my brain. 45k transactions a day isn't that much and processing 300kb xml files should be trivial. What am I missing? Was it tongue in cheek?
    - cullenking 17y ago
      I guess my response was a bit intense. but I will stand by with saying processing 45k 300kb files a day is a non-trivial task. Making the site handle that amount of traffic (serving the pages) is easy. Processing the data however, isn't. Consider it's being done through their proprietary firefox extension that works on two browsers and operating systems in order to pull info off your devices. Then it has to go to some cluster of background job processors. If you think growing your database/storage scheme by 2-5 gigs a day is 'trivial' then I commend you. From my experience, it's an easy recipe for setbacks. For example, our dataset is only 5 gigs, however at 5 gigs we are to the point of multi-hour schema changes in our data storage format. So, say you want to support handling laps from an uploaded logfile. A data migration of how many terabytes spanning how many hours?
ghshephard 17y ago
I've been thinking about this a bit, and I just came to the realization that Garmin basically did the precise _opposite_ of what Atlassian did. Atlassian, solidly located (and successful) in Sidney, Australia, went out its way to open up a branch in San Francisco (and an awesome branch it is) - thereby not only injecting the technology, culture, and people that you find in the valley, but also exposing themselves to tons of valley customers (It helps to be able to have half the company's executives show up to the user group meetings) You have to wonder what is going through Garmin's mind when they almost went out of their way to _shut down_ their valley subsidiary...
deleted 17y ago
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pclark 17y ago
really hope these guys get hired.
swah 17y ago
Shouldn't a team like this start their own business instead of thinking of being hired?
davidw 17y ago
Incidentally, isn't it kind of odd that a GPS device company is somewhere with so little... well, "geography", in the sense of mountains and other features. I would see them out west somewhere.
djb_hackernews 17y ago
Anyone else feel like that is a really big team for the product? Maybe I've just been on really stretched teams but 15 people with 4 product manager types, wow. Though I've never use it, the product looks great as far as I can tell. But comparing the products I've worked on I'd say we would have had half the head count.
njharman 17y ago
Olathe, Kansas. Grew up there. Had cows on mainstreet 1/4 century ago, damn that makes me sound old. Close enough to drive to Lawrence (KU) for punk rock shows and into Kansas City for industrial dance clubs. Not a bad place, really.
nroach 17y ago
They seem to be very management-heavy. I looked at the page at http://thegcteam.com/team http://thegcteam.com/team . Look at how many people they have listed as managers or coordinators. Unless all the development is being outsourced, I don't see how a 1.5:1 ratio of developers to managers is efficient. Perhaps this has something to do with why the team was missing its migration dates in the first place?
daok 17y ago
It doesn't render well on Chrome. Firefox works fine.

281 points by cullenking 17y ago

This seemed pretty interesting in that I could not recall another example of an entire development team leaving at once. Not to mention their way of putting themselves back on the market is interesting and humorous to say the least. Does anyone else have any examples of entire development teams leaving at once and offering themselves for hire? Seems like a great way for the competition to snap up talent.

ciscoriordan 17y ago
They're in California too so they didn't have non-competes. I bet if they went to Kansas they would have had to sign them.
- jamesbressi 17y ago
  I'll let you in on a secret. You don't need to be in California to not worry about "non-competes". An employer rarely ever holds an employee to it; it is rarely ever upheld in court; they are just a deterrent. You cannot lawfully stop someone from gainful employment. The only time you will ever see a non-compete become an issue is if it is an executive, and even then it is rare. You can stop someone from disclosing trade secrets, that is why most companies do a "non-compete / non-disclosure agreement". But, again, the non-compete part is about as enforced as the "do no remove label" on your mattress ;)
  - hga 17y ago
    As a threat they're pretty effective at killing successful startups before they start up. I've directly experienced this sort of thing twice (well, I knew better than to sign them but others had). Note that the lawsuit isn't going to be filed unless you're successful (or starting to be), upon which you're in for a world of hurt. Who wants to invest in a startup where success is going to earn that sort of "reward"?
  - cookiecaper 17y ago
    A company I used to work for is suing one of its ex-executives for starting a similar company after he was fired. I am interested to see how it turns out. The old bosses are of course telling everyone that they're going to win, but as you've noted, that goes against traditional wisdom and is probably just for psychological effect.
  - sshumaker 17y ago
    Non-competes can be enforced (even in California) if you are a founder and get bought out. I've seen a non-compete enforced on a normal employee in Virginia - someone left a tech company that did graphics visualization to do graphics programming at a game company. While he probably would have eventually won the suit, the new company defended him - eventually settling for like 60k.
earle 17y ago
Actually this happens very frequently when companies are acquired into larger more stagnant environments (or as Peter Lynch would label 'de-worisifcation'). It's not uncommon at all, and generally a good example of when these employees lockups or vesting has either completed, or reached an acceleration. If Garmin wanted to move these people, they should have done so during the acquisition.
- snagage 17y ago
  Peter Lynch labeled "de-worisifcation" as companies, for the sake of diversifying, heading into markets that have little relevance to their core business. It doesn't really apply here.
vl 17y ago
Original Windows NT team with Cutler leading it was hired by MS when they left DEC (or was hired and then left DEC?).
brown9-2 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Ward http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Ward
daleharvey 17y ago
didnt the jruby team leave when bought by sun and start engineyard?
- jim-greer 17y ago
  No, Engineyard was already around and was cool enough to give them jobs working on open source. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/jruby-team-leaves-sun-joins-engine-yard.ars http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/jruby-team-l...

benofsky 17y ago

Feels very unprofessional to me, really the sort of people you want to hire? Nothing wrong with not wanting to relocate but Garmin clearly didn't want to relocate just to annoy them, there were obviously organisational, cost or other business reasons to.

CamperBob 17y ago
(Shrug) I grew up in that part of the country, and left for a reason. Life's too short to spend it around people who think Jesus rode a dinosaur to work. Sorry if you disagree, but unless you're a robot, professionalism only goes so far.
- Xichekolas 17y ago
  In all fairness, I grew up about five miles from the Garmin headquarters, and most people in that area don't believe Jesus rode a dinosaur to work (that would be in Wichita). However, Olathe is a town of suburbs and schools and not much else. I wouldn't want to move back there, period, let alone from SF.
  - mturmon 17y ago
    Same here, and this rings true. "Nice" is what you get, and nice has its limits.
  - RK 17y ago
    Is that really the perception of Wichita? I would have said Topeka. (Most) All of the crazy abortion protesters are from out of town. (I lived in Wichita at one point long ago.) I'll add that some of the parts of Kansas I've been to seem very nice if you want to raise kids, or just relax, although I wouldn't want to stay there long term.
    - Xichekolas 17y ago
      I almost threw Topeka in there, but I wanted to keep it simple. I know a lot of decidedly cool people from Wichita... but I also know quite a few crazies.

hga 17y ago

I see that Garmin still does not treat its engineers well. For a number of years my father was the business manager for a group of microwave engineers in Olathe, Kansas, strangely enough (only a few hours north from SW Missouri). After that team failed to win a contract for some sort of JDAM precursor (I think, my father is not a techie) they broke up and their top dog was one of the first hired by the founders. Let's just say that the founders weren't terribly generous with employee stock allocation....

hyperbovine 17y ago
You lost me. The founders of Garmin had a killer idea, well ahead of its time, and they're terrible people for not lavishing the resulting riches on some lucky schmo who happened to be a talented electrical engineer living in Kansas at the time? You fail to appreciate that, while many people could have done the same job as your father's friend, it took a singular amount of vision and balls to build a company around a satellite network which wouldn't even be functional for another 4 years. If GPS failed, got axed by the gov, whatever, those guys would have been ruined while said friend would have walked away scot-free. People always seem to forget these points when bemoaning how undercompensated engineers--who after all, do all the "real" work--are.
- amackera 17y ago
  You forget that their "singular vision and balls" would be useless if no engineers every actually implemented it. The point of stock allocation is to get people to do the work that needs to be done, and it's risky because at the time of hire the engineer doesn't know if the idea will be successful. Generous stock allocation, in my mind, is a token of good-will to the engineer and a recognition of the importance of the engineering phase of the project.
  - abossy 17y ago
    If the engineer felt it was a bad deal, I'm sure he wouldn't have taken it.

mkinsella 17y ago

Well this is certainly disheartening as I'll be moving to Kansas City in a few months with my girlfriend as she attends medical school... My job hunt begins soon and all I'm hearing is negativity about KC.

tdm911 17y ago
well, i hear there are some jobs opening up at garmin.
ggchappell 17y ago
> ... all I'm hearing is negativity about KC. Which most likely comes from people who have never lived there. I think you can take it with a grain of salt. -- Someone who has lived there, but doesn't right now
whalesalad 17y ago
I'm a freelancer somehow surviving in Honolulu right now. It's expensive as hell. You'll figure it out! One cool thing to look forward to... Django was birthed in Kansas! I'd love to be surrounded by Django/Python jobs!
Xichekolas 17y ago
One place to check out in your job hunt is Perceptive Software. A lot of the really good people I knew from my undergrad days (I went to KU, which is about 40 minutes from KC) ended up there. They have a dodgeball court, and seem to try and be a fun place to work. Another popular option is Cerner. From what I have heard they have good pay and benefits, but expect lots of hours. Whatever you do, don't work for Sprint. They employ a ton of people in the area, but there is a running joke that the halflife of a job at Sprint is about nine months. They are constantly hiring and laying people off, and the people they lay off seem to be totally arbitrary.
jimduey 17y ago
I live within a mile of Garmin HQ. Kansas City is a very different town from SF, but it is a great place to live. Especially if your going to be raising a family.
17y ago

tbgvi 17y ago

On one hand, Garmin probably got what they wanted. Moving a whole office from San Francisco to Kansas seems like a passive aggresive way of downsizing. On the other hand, they probably weren't exactly expecting this reaction. And I have a feeling they aren't gonna like this. Well played ex-Garmin team, well played.

cookiecaper 17y ago
My hometown is Olathe, Kansas, Garmin's world headquarters. It is a really, really great town. These people are missing out on a very good opportunity. :)
- kordless 17y ago
  Yeah, your winters blow though. I should know, I lived in Oklahoma for 40 years. I'd much rather be out here with the mild weather, and computer nerds (of which I'm one).
- gridspy 17y ago
  To be separated from their friends, family and networks?
  - cookiecaper 17y ago
    More like they're missing an opportunity to make a whole new network of friends and family. If you work at Garmin, you'll meet a lot of smart people, so you'll have smart friends. Olathe is a much better place to raise children than San Francisco imo. Olathe is recognized as a pretty dope place; see http://www.olatheks.org/Council/Awards http://www.olatheks.org/Council/Awards , notably "Money Magazine ranked Olathe as America's 11th Best Place to Live noting the city's growth and major employers." I recognize that it's difficult to leave old friends and acquaintances, but it's also a great positive opportunity to make new, geographically-distributed networks. People relocate all the time. My family was brought to Kansas by a relocation from Florida and it was a very good thing for us, though of course when someone says "hey buddy why don't you come move to Kansas" it doesn't sound that attractive. Frankly, that's part of the reason it's important to go; these people have some prejudice against the place, but they haven't tried going there. It's a good place with just as many modern accouterments as any other. It's in one of the richest counties in the nation but has a pretty low cost of living. It is not the rural farm-town Kansas of lore. Obviously some people have compelling personal reasons to stay in SF, and that's fine. But it's highly unlikely that all of them have such reasons, most are probably just Kansas haters. :(

_delirium 17y ago

I like this idea on the whole, but isn't it using a bit too much of the branding/trademarks/etc. of the company they left? You can make factual statements about your former work, like "I used to be part of the Garmin Connect team", but this is verging on taking the name with it, with a no-longer-Garmin-affiliated organization still calling themselves the "Garmin Connect team", using Garmin Connect material (logos, demo videos, etc.) extensively on their site, etc. As a now ex-Garmin set of engineers, they can't really advertise their services using Garmin's name, though it can be listed as relevant experience.

gojomo 17y ago
The Garmin logo only appears in example screenshots; referring to their former employer by name is unavoidable, as on a resume. The Garmin-derived name ("gcteam") could be a problem, but it's not clear that Garmin is (or should be) unhappy with this sort of team-marketing. Garmin may very well wish the best to their soon-to-be-former employees, and be happy for them to showcase their Garmin work/affiliation as they look for a new employer.
CamperBob 17y ago
It seems fair enough for them to emphasize the work they did for Garmin, but that site might go a little too deeply into exactly how it was done. I can see Garmin getting upset about the implementation details.
- Kadin 17y ago
  Unless they're under NDA I don't really think Garmin has much of a say about that. A J2EE app server stack with AJAXy client side doesn't exactly seem like it would qualify for trade-secret protection. Making use of Garmin's trademarks (even indirectly, e.g. "gcteam") or other intellectual property, or giving out example logins to the production website ... those things seem much more problematic if the relationship with Garmin goes south. I've never heard of anyone getting slammed for discussing implementation details absent an NDA, unless there was source code or other obviously-proprietary IP involved.
danw 17y ago

Maciek416 17y ago

I can't imagine there are that many companies out there who are making products like this. Nike+, Runkeeper, Garmin.. Who else? Having only ever used one application like this, Runkeeper, I find it interesting how similar it looks to Runkeeper's UI and feature set. If you've got a ready-made team that can make a product like this but is unwilling to leave the bay area, it would seem there aren't a lot of companies around that can absorb a whole team like this overnight. I wonder where they'll turn up.

zackham 17y ago
The original poster (cullen) and I are behind http://ridewithgps.com http://ridewithgps.com, so this news is particularly interesting to us

uuilly 17y ago

Garmin has been consistently clueless about how software should be developed and deployed. They are the Verizon of GIS. No surprise that they jettisoned one of their more promising projects.

barrkel 17y ago
Indeed. The MapSource Windows app shipped with their GPS units is an abomination - awful usability packed into a 1996-era UI that looks two notches above an MFC tutorial. The map interaction is modal - you have to switch tools to choose whether you want to pan or zoom! And the logic for road labeling leaves plenty of room for ambiguity - the labels aren't rendered along a path, but are rather in straight lines at some randomly chosen tangent to the road, and sparsely enough that you have to guess that roads near one edge of the screen still have the same names they had on the other side. The built-in updating mechanism has never worked for me - it helpfully indicates that the update "is estimated to take 3 hour(s), 38 minute(s) to download on a 56k modem". A 56k modem, for a piece of software bought in 2009, whose About box indicates a copyright of 2008.
- uuilly 17y ago
  Hahaha. I sympathize with your rant. I have been a developer in the GIS world for 7 years and I don't own a dedicated GPS. I've always wanted one but the software and data issues leave me face-palming. Why they don't just open the standard / create an API or both is beyond me. Weekend developers writing iPhone apps have created better interfaces than these jokers.
  - enf 17y ago
    Fortunately you can pretty much ignore the Garmin software and just mount it as a USB drive to get maps on or GPS logs off.
    - uuilly 17y ago
      Interesting. Can you tell me which tools you use to work around Garmin? Mac compatible? Are their formats proprietary? Would be stoked for a solution.

temporaryacct 17y ago

Who would want to hire the kind of employee that doesn't care about causing a PR disaster? AVOID, these cats are selfish prima donnas who are not team players. Garmin isn't asking them to relocate for fun, they're doing it because they face an existential threat on the consumer side of things from the Iphone.

deleted 17y ago
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potatolicious 17y ago
And Garmin is a team player for conducting what is essentially a mass layoff? Employers can have no expectation of loyalty unless they are willing to demonstrate it in return.
- richardw 17y ago
  The team is worrying about itself. The management have to worry about themselves, the team, the rest of the staff, the stockholders, the continued existence of the company. They are being responsible and making what is likely an incredibly hard decision. The team? Looking out for themselves, while harming further the company that put up the resources and took the risks (and maybe came up with the ideas) for creating Garmin Connect.
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    How is Garmin's resources being used, and how is the company coming to harm from all of this? That's a very specious claim unless you have information the rest of us don't. All the team is doing is saying "hey, we built this for Garmin, but now we're on our own. If you think we do good work, come talk to us!" - how are they unfairly profiting from Garmin's product? I suppose you also refuse to talk about past work at previous employers on your resume/during interviews? Otherwise you'd be guilty of the same level of unfair profit. Furthermore, Garmin's resources aren't being used. Garmin isn't paying for the server that this page is on, in fact, Garmin's not paying for any of this attempt at advertising. What's your stance on this? Should all former employees of a company disavow their previous employment and not use any showing off of previous work (publicly accessible work, mind you!) to seek more employment? As for your first claim: the company is worrying about itself, and the team is worrying about itself. Everyone is a selfish, but rational actor in this situation. Nobody is evil - and I find it disingenuous to paint the team as profiteers when you fail to do so to Garmin also.

jim-greer 17y ago

They seem like a strong team, but the list of client technologies feels more like a skills list you would put on a resume than a reasonable design choice. Is there a javascript framework they didn't use? JavaScript, XHTML, CSS Prototype JQuery Ext Scriptaculous YUI Seam JSF & Facelets RichFaces Google Web Toolkit Adobe Flex Adobe Flash Google Maps API

slpsys 17y ago
Hey, mootools. But point well taken.
euroclydon 17y ago
kitchensink.js
cullenking 17y ago
Yeah, but it is a resume of sorts, its what the site is about. Still cracked me up, up you go :)
Kadin 17y ago
> feels more like a skills list you would put on a resume Well, yeah; the website is a resume, for the entire team. It's just describing the site they built as an example of past performance. So including every framework they even looked at is, if not great, at least understandable.

andrewljohnson 17y ago

If I can get some VC funding, then this group would be a treasure trove of hires for my company.

minouye 17y ago

The icing on the cake is the Amazon affiliate links to Garmin products (see right side-bar below twitter feed: http://thegcteam.com/about http://thegcteam.com/about)

listic 17y ago
Don't they deserve the right to use affiliate links? I think everyone is free to use affiliate links on their site. Even more so, if you are the developer of this product.
raganwald 17y ago
I agree. They seem to be proud of their work and would love you to buy more Garmin stuff. If I were Garmin I'd be throwing chairs right about now, I would have de-hired a dev team and a sales force at the same time.

tmcw 17y ago

This sucks. I just uploaded my most recent run to Garmin Connect, because it's so incredibly better than Nike+ or any of that cheese. Your data is open, the frontend is super-flexible, the browser plugin is great. Sigh.

Daniel_Newby 17y ago

Wow. The back-end and business performance details they publish go pretty far into trade secret territory. Garmin probably won't sue to avoid giving off bad recruiting vibes, but I would think twice about hiring these folks.

unperson 17y ago

Where is the story about how they actually declined? All I am seeing is their team resume.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

fseek 17y ago

Good for them. I wonder what Garmin thinks in terms of competitors now easily finding a large group of ex-employees.

marstall 17y ago

"I’ve worn many hats, and enjoyed everyone." http://thegcteam.com/team http://thegcteam.com/team yeah, that's not gonna fly in Olathe, Kansas.

tamwoods 17y ago

Here's more insight from a Garmin Connect customer with thorough speculation and confirmation from insiders - http://dcrainmaker.blogspot.com/2010/03/garmin-connect-development-team-tossed.html http://dcrainmaker.blogspot.com/2010/03/garmin-connect-devel...

bricestacey 17y ago

I was clicking through some of the team's profile and Anothony Pelosi ticked "Willing To Relocate: Yes" on his resume on dice.com. Obviously, this shouldn't be taken at face value. The truth is, no employeee is willing to relocate unless it's obviously beneficial to them, which is not always the case.

viraptor 17y ago
There are many, many details about relocation that cannot be told via a single checkbox. Is the relocation sponsored? Does employer provide a temporary place to live in? How far is the relocation? Is it relocation within the same state / country / continent? How many people do you know in the area of the company? I don't think this is ever a "yes/no" question.
allwein 17y ago
There's a huge difference between "Willing to Relocate" and "Willing to Relocate anywhere". I currently live in Pittsburgh, and I'd be willing to relocate anywhere on the East Coast between Charlotte, N.C. and Boston. Most of my family and friends are out east, so I'm not willing to relocate to the midwest or the west coast or abroad. So being willing to relocate but having restrictions doesn't make Mr. Pelosi a hypocrite
- bricestacey 17y ago
  I don't think I ever implied he was a hypocrite. I was just pointing out that, although people are willing to relocate, it can't be taken at face value.

mistermann 17y ago

I haven't gone through the whole website, and I have no idea to what degree Garmin developers are limited by their management, But I own a Garmin XXX who knows, I bought it about 2.5 years ago, for about $750, it was very close to top of the line (text to voice, etc). I used it a bit, it worked pretty good, but as a software developer, I couldn't stop thinking about the UI failures. Failure after failure. You might think some would be caused by hardware limitations, and I always appreciated this, but even considering that, it was just unsatisfying. So, Garmin has been working on this for years, they are up to version who knows what....and then google comes out with their navigation program on Andriod....it is night and day, despite this being like version 6 (I'm guessing) for Garmin vs Version 0.5 for Google. Yes, Google has some architectural advantages that Garmin doesn't, so they can offer some amazing advanced features, but for me it's the small things that make the difference...like, does using your software make any sense? I wish these guys the best of luck, assuming they're been unhappy with how things have been for years, but if they they their work of 2 years ago was "good", I'm sorry, you guys should really be in a different profession.

huhtenberg 17y ago
These are Garmin Connect guys. They are not responsible for the actual devices, but rather for some sort of a social web overlay on top of the devices.

naqeeb 17y ago

I think that they should use to as an opportunity to launch a consulting company focused on webapps. I've not used Garmin connect but some of the features look promising enough that other websites would benefit.

richardw 17y ago

Yeah, because I want to hire someone who will use my resources to get themselves hired elsewhere. It's like a girlfriend using my money to put up a profile on a dating site.

richardw 17y ago
Downvotes. I guess the talent is feeling particularly precious today. Kids: when you start hiring people, maybe you'll change your mind. edit: And checkout http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197891 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197891 - this is your uber talent who deserves special treatment during a recession?

plasticbuddha 17y ago

WTF, Garmin... The real issue for me as a long time sports user of their products is, if this causes problems with garmin connect (like I expect), I will finally be fed up with their products. I've had nothing but disappointment with Garmin's commitment to their products until Connect came out. I hope this isn't the last stupid move of a failed company.

cullenking 17y ago
Garmin makes fairly solid devices (they have their flaws, but in general work well), however I feel you on their software. It's a nightmare, as any person who has used Garmin Training Center or Mapsource can tell you. If you are really fedup with connect, try out our service at http://ridewithgps.com http://ridewithgps.com. We offer much of the same stuff they do and more.

randomstring 17y ago

The team fails to mention that the deployment of Garmin Connect was over a year late and the migration from motionbased.com (which Garmin bought) was a total disaster. It looks like the motionbased.com blog and forums have been taken down. That makes it hard for those who didn't go through that hell, like I and many others did, to appreciate just what a total cluster fsck the transition was. The new site, while much prettier with all its shiny web 2.0-ness, is functionally on par with the site it replaced. Here is a cached forum link talking about how the December 2008 launch is slipping. http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:YnEfNC3lDnwJ:forums.motionbased.com/smf/index.php%3Ftopic%3D10744.0+connect+motionbased+migration&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:YnEfNC3lDnwJ:forums.moti...

cullenking 17y ago
Yeah they definitely lagged from what I can see, but if they are accurate in their statements of 45,000 logged activities a day, that's a TON. To put it in perspective, a single XML log file from my Garmin GPS bike computer is around 200-300kb for a 30-40 mile ride. Imagine that infrastructure buildout! Not defending a slow release schedule, but it's not "trivial" after working in this industry for the last couple years. That, and any corporate structure slows a development team down considerably. Nice dig for the cache, thanks for the info :)
- djb_hackernews 17y ago
  This is coming from the confused part of my brain. 45k transactions a day isn't that much and processing 300kb xml files should be trivial. What am I missing? Was it tongue in cheek?
  - cullenking 17y ago
    I guess my response was a bit intense. but I will stand by with saying processing 45k 300kb files a day is a non-trivial task. Making the site handle that amount of traffic (serving the pages) is easy. Processing the data however, isn't. Consider it's being done through their proprietary firefox extension that works on two browsers and operating systems in order to pull info off your devices. Then it has to go to some cluster of background job processors. If you think growing your database/storage scheme by 2-5 gigs a day is 'trivial' then I commend you. From my experience, it's an easy recipe for setbacks. For example, our dataset is only 5 gigs, however at 5 gigs we are to the point of multi-hour schema changes in our data storage format. So, say you want to support handling laps from an uploaded logfile. A data migration of how many terabytes spanning how many hours?

ghshephard 17y ago

I've been thinking about this a bit, and I just came to the realization that Garmin basically did the precise _opposite_ of what Atlassian did. Atlassian, solidly located (and successful) in Sidney, Australia, went out its way to open up a branch in San Francisco (and an awesome branch it is) - thereby not only injecting the technology, culture, and people that you find in the valley, but also exposing themselves to tons of valley customers (It helps to be able to have half the company's executives show up to the user group meetings) You have to wonder what is going through Garmin's mind when they almost went out of their way to _shut down_ their valley subsidiary...

deleted 17y ago

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pclark 17y ago

really hope these guys get hired.

swah 17y ago

Shouldn't a team like this start their own business instead of thinking of being hired?

davidw 17y ago

Incidentally, isn't it kind of odd that a GPS device company is somewhere with so little... well, "geography", in the sense of mountains and other features. I would see them out west somewhere.

djb_hackernews 17y ago

Anyone else feel like that is a really big team for the product? Maybe I've just been on really stretched teams but 15 people with 4 product manager types, wow. Though I've never use it, the product looks great as far as I can tell. But comparing the products I've worked on I'd say we would have had half the head count.

njharman 17y ago

Olathe, Kansas. Grew up there. Had cows on mainstreet 1/4 century ago, damn that makes me sound old. Close enough to drive to Lawrence (KU) for punk rock shows and into Kansas City for industrial dance clubs. Not a bad place, really.

nroach 17y ago

They seem to be very management-heavy. I looked at the page at http://thegcteam.com/team http://thegcteam.com/team . Look at how many people they have listed as managers or coordinators. Unless all the development is being outsourced, I don't see how a 1.5:1 ratio of developers to managers is efficient. Perhaps this has something to do with why the team was missing its migration dates in the first place?

daok 17y ago

It doesn't render well on Chrome. Firefox works fine.