Perspective from Customer Operations -- A Mixed Bag
Pros
Disclaimer: Much of my experience at Dexcom is only applicable to customer operations as I've only ever worked in this department. All the other departments—finance, HR, legal, manufacturing, engineering, etc.—have different leadership, cultures, and even occupy different buildings, so my subjective experience is mostly applicable to customer operations only. With that said, here are the pros about working at Dexcom: Great health insurance benefits. Above average pay and paid time off. Usually you're surrounded by amiable colleagues with a lot of upbeat personalities. It's a great feeling knowing you're part of a very worthy cause. Dexcom continues to grow and so job security has never been an issue. I believe the senior management in customer operations really does want to make Dexcom a better place to work.
Cons
No 401k match. There is very limited opportunity for career growth, but at least there are plenty of opportunities for lateral moves to different teams within customer ops (e.g., the most common one I see are Customer Service Representatives becoming Account Specialists or Reorder Sales Specialists). However, don't expect to move up. While there are openings for supervisory roles that come up once in a while, there's generally very little in the way of moving up in this department. Dexcom prefers to hire external candidates that are way overqualified and have tons of experience rather than hire internally and develop their existing employees. Lots of Patient Sales Specialists are interested in moving to a field sales position, but Dexcom has not hired an inside sales rep for the field in years. I have also witnessed other departments such as regulatory and clinical not hiring candidates from other departments; even though the candidates might have the requisite educational background, they are declined a position because they don't have the experience. I don't know if Dexcom has been burned one too many times with internal hires not panning out, but Dexcom tends to shy away from developing talent from within. Work/life balance is meh. I suspect most people probably feel the same way. I asked for a permanent shift change and was denied because my supervisor felt that having an earlier shift would change the perception of my internal customers towards me. I guess I can understand the rationale, but I was the most tenured person on my team, and preference for shift changes have historically gone to the people that have worked here the longest, and I really don't like sitting in traffic for an hour or more because my shift ends close to 5 PM. Also, only certain salaried positions have the ability to work from home, but this isn't too surprising. You will encounter apathetic colleagues, or colleagues with very poor follow-through, or folks that simply don't communicate very well. This is pretty much true of every company, although I was surprised at the number of salaried/career type people this applied to. Customer ops is an open concept floor plan and essentially a giant cube farm, so if you like that environment, great. For the rest of us... not so great.
