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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?

#11

Post by crazygringo »

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...

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

#12

Post by simonw »

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.

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

#13

Post by petesergeant »

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

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

#14

Post by crazygringo »

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 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.

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

#16

Post by kube-system »

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.

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.

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

#17

Post by ravenstine »

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.

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.

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

#18

Post by aendruk »

jcims wrote: post #5

Look for yourself i guess? (EDIT: need to be logged in) 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.

What’s at that link? It just redirects me to /signup/cold-join.

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

#19

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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. Any company with a huge number of customers is going to have a lot of headcount related to dealing with customers.

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

#20

Post by bastard_op »

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.
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