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

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

#21

Post by brianwawok »

petesergeant wrote: post #13
razwall wrote: post #7

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."

Eng team of 1,500 then, revenue of $1.4m per head

That is still mind blowing.

1500 developers for a click to sign platform? Competitors have done it with 1% of that or less.

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

#22

Post by PragmaticPulp »

petesergeant wrote: post #13
razwall wrote: post #7

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."

Eng team of 1,500 then, revenue of $1.4m per head

> Eng team of 1,500 then

Not quite. 1500 people in "Engineering, product development, and customer success", so not just engineering.

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

#23

Post by Hermitian909 »

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.

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

#24

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

crazygringo wrote: post #14
diego wrote: post #3

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.

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…

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.

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

#25

Post by kube-system »

brianwawok wrote: post #21
petesergeant wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eng team of 1,500 then, revenue of $1.4m per head

That is still mind blowing. 1500 developers for a click to sign platform? Competitors have done it with 1% of that or less.

Competitors have also done it with 1% of their revenue or less.

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

#26

Post by mrguyorama »

simonw wrote: post #12
razwall wrote: post #7

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."

I wonder what the difference between "customer success" and "customer operations" is here.

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"

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

#28

Post by acchow »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #19
razwall wrote: post #7

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."

> 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 bet there's some market analysis of SaaS companies showing how differently they can be run. I wonder if it's bimodal - SaaS with 50% sales headcount.

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

#29

Post by babyshake »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #23

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…

> 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.

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

#30

Post by mikestew »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #19
razwall wrote: post #7

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."

> 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.

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