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Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

• faangiq 4y ago
  That’s mostly sales people.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• diego 4y ago
  Large companies have lots of employees not because they need them, but because they can. Many of the people who are good at leadership happen to like empire building and having reports. Every employee in a company is also an evangelist and a marketer, without even trying. Everyone answers the question "where do you work." Having lots of employees gives you slack, and it's easy to get rid of the slack with layoffs.
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    The economy today is more competitive than it's ever been. Hiring lots of unneeded employees is one of the easiest ways to obliterate your entire profit margin -- you'll go out of business and your competitors will eat your lunch. So no, there is absolutely no truth whatsoever to your statement. Of course companies make mistakes and overhire sometimes, just like they make mistakes and underhire sometimes. Nobody can estimate future headcount needs perfectly without a crystal ball. But the idea that companies are just hiring extra people "because they can" in order to "build empires" and "have reports" is one of the most nonsensical things I've ever heard. And I say this having worked at multiple large companies.
    • hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
      While I agree with you, I've also seen some crazy stuff that was hard to process for me, and I personally had to burn a lot of cash just because we were assigned it.
    • doix 4y ago
      > But the idea that companies are just hiring extra people "because they can" in order to "build empires" and "have reports" is one of the most nonsensical things I've ever heard. This definitely happens, I'm not saying that is the case here, but to dismiss it outright is pretty nonsensical in my view. Obviously it's not the "company" strategy to hire people and waste money, but company incentives and individual incentives start diverging very quickly in large cash flush companies. The best thing for the company isn't necessarily the best thing for an individual to get promoted. I have definitely worked on projects that were entirely pointless and only existed to "use up resources" and justify hiring more. Bigger teams require more levels of middle management which results in promotions. Again, not saying this is the case here.
    • fallingknife 4y ago
      I have personally seen empire building at companies as early as series B. It definitely happens, especially in the weird VC ecosystem where raising the next round is entirely dependent on revenue growth rather than profitability, which is always just assumed will come eventually with scale.
  • ravenstine 4y ago
    Right, and what that slack can mean is if SHTF then they can throw a bunch of people at the problem. Doesn't matter if most of those people are idiots because the point isn't even to solve the problem per se but for responsibility to be evenly distributed.
  • dominotw 4y ago
    This only works if incumbent is immune from competition due to regulatory capture and other roadblocks for new entrants. eg: healthinsurance cartels.
• shishy 4y ago
  wonder what the type of roles are (sales / support) vs eng
• jcims 4y ago
  Look for yourself i guess? (EDIT: need to be logged in) https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?currentCompany=%5B%2219022%22%5D&heroEntityKey=urn%3Ali%3Aorganization%3A19022&origin=FACETED_SEARCH&sid=Khs https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?currentCompa... 'DocuSign' is a company and a product. The scope of the company is much greater than the product. I wouldn't guess less than 3000 for sure.
  • aendruk 4y ago
    What’s at that link? It just redirects me to /signup/cold-join.
    • jcims 4y ago
      sorry you probably need to be logged in. it's a canned search to people saying they currently work at DocuSign (6300 results iirc)
      • tecleandor 4y ago
        The LinkedIn Premium Insights section for Docusign shows almost 9k employees with this distribution: https://i.postimg.cc/DZKS1vK6/Screenshot-2022-09-28-23-18-57-66-d0ef7a9810af20f7b394f4f927b723b0.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/DZKS1vK6/Screenshot-2022-09-28-23-18-57...
• beoberha 4y ago
  I’d assume a large chunk of them are in the field. Having a worldwide network of sales teams, both technical, nontechnical, and in between adds up.
• razwall 4y ago
  Per their latest annual report: "As of January 31, 2022, we had 7,461 employees, of which approximately 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative. We had approximately 69% of our employees based in the U.S. and the remainder in international locations."
  • simonw 4y ago
    I wonder what the difference between "customer success" and "customer operations" is here.
    • kube-system 4y ago
      customer success is probably the long term, proactive activities: keep the customer happy, manage renewals, be proactive. customer operations is probably the short term customer interactions: support tickets, integration support, help desk, etc.
      • to11mtm 4y ago
        IIRC (It's been a while since I've worked with their teams) Customer Success was handled by the 'integration support' at Docusign. If I -also- recall, When I did an Auth0 integration (a few years before that) I worked with a similar 'Customer Success' specialist while evaluating for an integration. I think this is the trade-off that's happening; By putting integration support under a 'marketing' budget rather than a 'support' budget, it allows for a happier adopting customer base. I must add however; those examples stand out to me not because it was 'sales-y' but because they were extremely memorable times of a vendor team working very hard to lead our teams into a pit of success. The best analogy I can think of is the difference between someone on a call giving a vague phrase you have to search through API docs for, vs a direct link to documentation complete with verbose-yet-sane examples.
    • mrguyorama 4y ago
      One gets paid big sales commission bucks and the other does the actual work and is told "we can't afford a raise this year"
• nine_zeros 4y ago
  Sometimes, it's just marketing, sales, HR and support. For a B2B, these divisions scale almost linearly with number of paid customers.
• ekidd 4y ago
  One common driver of headcount is enterprise sales and support. Once you charge at least $75,000/year, you need to put salespeople on planes, you need to provide actual tech support, and (unless you're disciplined and lucky) you end up with hundreds of features that are only used by one or two big customers each. Enterprise software is fundamentally a whole different beast. Customers will write big checks, but they expect a lot of different things in return for that money. I don't know whether this applies to DocuSign.
  • cogman10 4y ago
    You've described my company to a T. We aren't even that big and our customer service, sales, and marketing department make up about 80% of our workforce (even though we are SAAS).
• austenallred 4y ago
  They're mostly sales, marketing, and customer service. Engineering is mostly supporting integrations with every arbitrary platform and CRM they can possible handle.
• crazygringo 4y ago
  It's quite easy to figure out if you look at their annual report, for example. [1] Literally the first two pages of content explain, emphasis mine: > To address this opportunity, our sales and marketing strategy focuses on businesses at all scales, from global enterprise to local very small businesses (“VSBs”). We rely on our direct sales force and partnerships to sell to enterprises and commercial businesses, and our web-based self-service channel to sell to VSBs, which is the most cost-effective way to reach our smallest customers. > Hundreds of integrations with other mainstream systems where work gets done, such as applications offered by Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Workday. > Globally adopted. Our expertise in electronic signature and other agreement technologies is truly global. This is key, given that different regions have different laws, standards and cultural norms. We assist multiple parties in different jurisdictions to complete agreements and other documents in a legally valid manner > Vertical offerings. We offer enhanced solutions tailored to particular industries, such as financial services, real estate, life sciences, and government. In some cases, these may be variants of a product like DocuSign eSignature —for example, our additional DocuSign eSignature options for assisting with compliance with U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations. In other cases, it may be a distinct product for an industry, such as Rooms for Real Estate, which includes task management, templates, and workflow for real estate transactions. You can see from their expenses that they spend two and a half times as much on sales and marketing than they do on research and development. It's very easy to imagine how you could need 2,000 engineers to build and support e.g. 500 different integrations and 50 industry-specific solutions, all of which need to be actively maintained for compatibility. And then an even larger salesforce that is selling to companies literally across the globe. Not to mention the lawyers and legal analysts attached to all of those. Docusign isn't a mere PDF viewer computer program, it's a business that provides ironclad legal services that are vetted by lawyers and guaranteed for your industry's specific legal needs in the countries where you operate. [1] https://s22.q4cdn.com/408980645/files/doc_financials/2022/ar/DOCUSIGN_10K_2022_ebook_V2.pdf https://s22.q4cdn.com/408980645/files/doc_financials/2022/ar...
• Ekaros 4y ago
  I think there is also certain amount location specific regulatory and marketing work.
• bastard_op 4y ago
  This is like still asking why any competent organization still installs adobe acrobat reader by default on like every pc, and has to subsequently patch it every 2 weeks when it has exploits found still after ~25 years. Flash just finally died, and even then organizations turn to pirate builds to support ancient enterprise shitware still in use today.
• Hermitian909 4y ago
  For SAAS companies that do B2B it's important to remember two arms of the company: 1. Sales -> You can hire a lot of sales people if they're generating enough business to cover their own salaries 2. Customer Support -> Big enterprise contracts generally have support written into them. Thus, for every enterprise customer Docusign may need anywhere from 0.1 -> 3 (or more) FTEs. If you price this right it's always worth it to keep growing the org this way. Docusign has a lot of opportunities to upsell customers on legal services they provide. You should also consider the scaling cost of internal support. For every 10 FTEs, add a manager. Also add on HR, accounting, janitorial, etc. Easilly 20% of the company might be these sorts of internal support roles.
  • babyshake 4y ago
    > 1. Sales -> You can hire a lot of sales people if they're generating enough business to cover their own salaries It won't be long before GPT-3 or its successors will be putting many people out of a sales or support job.
    • groby_b 4y ago
      Willing to make a bet on that? GPT-3 is great at sounding coherent, but much worse at actually reliably solving problems. I absolutely see GPT-3 like things aiding with sales decks, but... it won't replace the sales person. There's also a large component of enterprise sales having a "trust" component where you know your counterparts. You're not spending approval-worthy amounts of money after only having talked to a chat bot.
      • athenot 4y ago
        > GPT-3 is great at sounding coherent, but much worse at actually reliably solving problems. I absolutely see GPT-3 like things aiding with sales decks, but... it won't replace the sales person. Also, if your competitors are using GPT-3 to solve customer problems, having an actual, intelligent human can be a formidable differentiator in terms of customer experience.
      • zachthewf 4y ago
• barbariangrunge 4y ago
  Imagine they operate in 150 countries and have 50 team members for each doing sales and support and outreach. It still seems like a lot but being international does add a lot of jobs
• rossdavidh 4y ago
  There is no limit to how high headcount can go, for virtually any business, unless something stops it. That doesn't mean anyone is intentionally padding the rolls, either. There is a certain momentum, as more people requires more supervisors and more support and more support for the support. 7400 people have a lot of company computers/IT, human resources requirements, payroll and accounting, etc. More people "requires" more people, in an ever-increasing spiral of hiring...until suddenly there is a hard stop that requires it to not increase, or even decrease. I have witnessed this in corporate, startup, university, and governmental organizations, so it's not much to do with the task to be done. More people requires more people, until and unless something else requires that there be less people instead. For Docusign, we have apparently just encountered that "something else".
• jdoliner 4y ago
  The rest of the internet when workers get laid off: Those poor workers, I hope they'll be able to find something new and provide for their families. Hacker news: Good, that company had too many employees anyway. \s in case it's not obvious
  • MattGaiser 4y ago
    Unemployment is that foreign to tech people.
    • pclmulqdq 4y ago
      While ironically barreling towards many of us at high speed. White collar tech workers are likely to face the worst of the layoffs in this round of economic troubles.
      • Spooky23 4y ago
        Yup. The days of $500k for doing nothing are ending soon.
• mostertoaster 4y ago
  Has docusign become what google has to search? Like I say to my insurance agent, “do I need to docusign something”?
  • jimmygrapes 4y ago
    Today I spoke with an older gentleman on the phone who said "let me give you my Gmail" and proceeded to give me an icloud.com address. Twenty minutes later a young coworker asked if the WiFi was down -- but everything in our office is ethernet wired. I am still processing this odd feeling of being in a generational bubble when it comes to avoiding tech eponyms (although I am certainly guilty of asking for a kleenex or calling my slow cooker a crock pot).
• AlwaysRock 4y ago
  Knowing a few people there work there... They have teams that work with specific customers to customize their product. I'm guessing a large client like Google could have a team of 100+ folks alone working on that client (across sales, tech, support). The other thing is that they do stuff outside of just signing documents. They are a software company. They work in the enterprise space too. That ends up pulling in a ton of people to support those large clients. Could they cut a lot of folks? Sure. But just about every large company could.
• rootusrootus 4y ago
  I feel the same way about most big corporations. Tech companies are not immune. I had a FB recruiter once brag to me about their Messenger team occupying a couple floors in Seattle and a couple floors in Menlo Park. Holy hell, what do you do on a project like Messenger with that many devs??
  • collyw 4y ago
    Scaling is likely to be the biggest problem, not app development.
    • systemvoltage 4y ago
      They should just use Kubernetes™.
      • collyw 4y ago
        Is there going to be a flip on kubernetes like we saw with the mongo hype from 10 years ago? It seems overkill for so many things.
  • MattGaiser 4y ago
    Countries, languages, fonts, internet speeds, 10 different platforms, abuse, scaling, infrastructure, testing, etc.
• Optimal_Persona 4y ago
  I have no horse in this race other than being a Docusign enterprise HIPAA plan customer for my org of ~150 people, but: IME Docusign is absolutely at the tiptop of product quality, documentation, and service for any SAAS company I've ever used in the last 16 years. Whether that requires 0.74, 7.4, or 7.4 million employees is up to them.
• aaron695 4y ago
• jccalhoun 4y ago
  I am always amazed when I hear company x laid off 600 workers and I"m like, "how did they have that many people working there?" I know it is probably sales and stuff but it it still seems unreal. I've never had an office job and so it is like some kind of urban legend for me (Like I grew up in the country so I never knew anyone that actually went to summer camp, so I thought it was a fake thing made up for movies and tv.) Even though I'm nearly 50 I still relate to that tiktok of the woman asking what people do in an office all day https://www.tiktok.com/@mads.ringswaldegan/video/7092055375633206574 https://www.tiktok.com/@mads.ringswaldegan/video/70920553756...
• globular-toast 4y ago
  What does "steelman" mean in this context?
  • medstrom 4y ago
    Basically, it means "explain". The connotation is the opposite of straw-man, so OP wants people to start from the assumption that it's true they need all those 7,400 employees, and explain why this would be the case. OP is not looking for cynical explanations such as that they only have so many employees due to incompetence.
    • globular-toast 4y ago
      "Explain" was the only possibility I came up with and was wondering how on earth OP got an autocomplete error to the word "steelman". What a grossly unnecessary word.
  • odysseus 4y ago
    It might mean "reinforce this argument/provide evidence for this", per https://constantrenewal.com/steel-man https://constantrenewal.com/steel-man From the context, it might also mean "rebut this as strongly as possible", "criticize this" or "defuse this argument". It's unfamiliar wording to me as well. Does anyone have a rough etymology of "steelman" as a verb?
    • chihuahua 4y ago
      I think steelman is derived as the opposite of strawman. Taken literally, something made from straw is weak, and something made from steel is strong. A strawman is an imaginary opponent who is easy to defeat. Like a scarecrow (a human-like figure stuffed with straw, meant to scare off birds from crops) which would be easy to defeat because it doesn't fight back when attacked.
  • gwd 4y ago
    It's the opposite of strawman. A strawman argument is a weak argument to justify a position you disagree with; its purpose is rhetorical: It's meant to make your position look strong to onlookers (and perhaps to yourself). A steelman argument is the strongest possible argument you can come up with to justify a position you disagree with; its meant to help you find the truth by taking seriously the people who disagree with you. OP is using the word slightly differently than normal, in that the position OP disagrees with here is, "Docusign needs 7,400 employees". A strawman would be, "Docusign needs 7,400 employees because it needs to show the stock market that it's a serious company" -- weak and easy to demonstrate that it's stupid. A steelman would be, "Docusign actually needs that many sales people and customer service reps."
• iancmceachern 4y ago
  For reference, I've worked in companies of 500-1000 total employees where the companies designed, manufactured, sold and dealt with regulators all for things like artificial hearts (lvads), surgical robotics systems, etc. How is docusign 10x mor complicated?
  • hedgehog 4y ago
    In my experience if the "what the company does" headline seems too trivial then you have to dig deeper to understand what they're really doing. Business at scale tends to have fractal-like complexity and a lot of the work goes into fighting entropy rather than building the really obvious customer-visible stuff. See also why Uber's app is almost 400MB or why Twitter has 7k employees. On the other hand Weyerhaeuser manages millions of acres of land on only around 2k employees. Always in the details.
• 29athrowaway 4y ago
  They don't have 7,400 engineers, if that is what you were thinking.
• wenbin 4y ago
  DocuSign did ~$2.4B annual revenue [1]. So each employee generates ~$320k annual revenue ($2.4B / 7,400), which sounds about right. SaaS companies typically do low $100,000s per employee per year. [1] https://www.docusign.com/press-releases/docusign-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2022-financial-results https://www.docusign.com/press-releases/docusign-announces-f...
• tomschungry 4y ago
  9% layoff... ~666+ folks. Sad.
• fragmede 4y ago
  What to recalibrate on, is that this is what a well funded $580 million revenue per quarter org looks like. You could certainly build a leaner org, with just 50 engineers, and way fewer features, but it's not going to be the industry stronghold that DocuSign is, not without some sort of competitive advantage (like when the Internet was new and you're competing as against companies that haven't digitized yet, but even then).
• leros 4y ago
  Products get complicated when you're trying to be #1 in the world. It might take you a few months to slap together your MPV with a couple of devs, but several years later you need a 10 person team to work full time on the location autocomplete function because having your location autocomplete be 10% better than a competitor makes you millions of dollars.
• dschiavu 4y ago
  Have a read of David Grabber’s essay “On the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, it explains this phenomenon quite well.