Earlier quoted context omitted.
Politicians have been automated through a combination of polling data and lobbyist checks since B. Clinton.
Are you saying B Clinton is not a human?
Define human.
Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
111–120 of 166 posts
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#112For 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…
Aren't sales people also heavily paid in commission? I.e. for a large part, you only pay if they bring in business?
For a lot of B2B SAAS which sells to enterprise, sales people can get decent salaries. An SDR (finds leads and books meetings) could get anywhere from 50-65k Base salary with commissions and Account Executives (AE, they do demos and close) could even get starting salaries of 100K plus. So yes, they get paid through commissions but at SAAS companies, they also get a decent base to start with. Ultimately though, the total comp. adds to the payroll and reduces profit regardless.
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
Correct. The last professions in the world to be automated will be salesperson, politician, and plumber.
I think sex workers are up there too. Similarly to a good salesperson, the skill and human touch will probably always be a differentiator compared to a machine/AI, leaving at least a niche market for humans.
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone actually directly employ janitorial staff these days?
I have been involved with companies with government security clearances and organizations simply worried about intellectual property theft. As a rule, the most serious of those organizations do not allow subcontractors free rein of the building, which janitors need. (Edit: Yes, I am aware of some high profile failures.)
I've worked in aerospace and chemical companies where there's all kinds of data restrictions etc and both contract the janitorial staff
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#115For 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…
> 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.
It will happen the day humans stop having emotions. So, never. Humans buy with emotions whether we like it or not. Emotions require another human to talk to. You cannot "Product Led or AI led" your way out of complex purchases.
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative Ratios like this are fairly common. I think the confusion comes from engineers who look at a SaaS and assume it's mostly engineers like themselves. Engineering is a small portion of the headcount. A lot of customer-related needs scale with the number of customers.…
I think the confusion comes from... For some, the confusion comes from "wow, that's about half the headcount that Microsoft had when I started in the mid-90s, and MSFT was building, selling, and supporting Windows, Visual Studio, Office,..." Perhaps DocuSign's products are, in fact, about half of Microsoft's big three products, but of what I know of DocuSign it's still a big number to me.
I wasn't around then but is it possible that we have learned more about B2B SaaS since the mid-90s through trial and error? And the conclusion the industry has come to is Microsoft would have been better off at that time with more sellers and customer ops hires?
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#117For 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?
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have been involved with companies with government security clearances and organizations simply worried about intellectual property theft. As a rule, the most serious of those organizations do not allow subcontractors free rein of the building, which janitors need. (Edit: Yes, I am aware of some high profile failures.)
I've worked in aerospace and chemical companies where there's all kinds of data restrictions etc and both contract the janitorial staff
As have I. The most serious are not outsourcing.
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
FYI for you and other readers, sales is actually hard. Low barrier to entry followed by brutal survival of the fittest. Don't meet your quota? Fuck you, you're fired. People who survive for decades of that aren't trivially replaced.
You underestimate future AI tech (from 10-50 years from today) even more than you think I underestimate sales skills. The tech will completely blow your mind away, and you don't even see it coming ;)
At that point why would you even have AI sales?
If this tech is going to be so amazing, it'll be better served by being a procurement/buyer system.
"Hey AI, what CRM system should I use [based on all the knowledge you have of my business already]?"
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#120What does "steelman" mean in this context?
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.