Has docusign become what google has to search? Like I say to my insurance agent, “do I need to docusign something”?
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?
#52For 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…
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.)
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#53For 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.
Think about how complex it is to develop AI that can understand and participate in a human conversation at only a basic level.
Now increase that complexity by orders of magnitude, since we're talking about the conversational skillset that a successful salesperson would have.
Everything is possible over a long enough timeline, but when AI is advanced enough to function as a successful salesperson, there will be a large number of other jobs that AI will also be "replacing".
In other words, the timeline for what you're predicting is much longer than you think it is.
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
You're not gonna replace people who make phone calls all day without something more or less indistinguishable from strong AI. Nobody wants robo-calls.
You don't need chatbot tech to be indistinguishable from strong AI, just indistinguishable from an average salesperson. Like babyshake, I firmly believe that this will happen one day. 10 years? 50 years?
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#55Earlier 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.)
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Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#56Knowing 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.
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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…
> I absolutely see GPT-3 like things aiding with sales decks, but... it won't replace the sales person.
If there's a sales person whose job is to tailor sales decks to use cases, you might replace them.
If a big sale takes a team of people to execute, maybe AI cuts a few of them off. Maybe the client is still talking to a real sales person when they need to, but that sales person is able to multiplex to more clients because the time they need to put into each is reduced.
I think people often miss this aspect of "X technology will make this job obsolete"; it isn't "that occupation no longer exists" as much as "far fewer of that occupation are now necessary to do the work", and that change can have meaningful economic impacts. Farriers, blacksmiths and calligraphers still exist, but their work is no longer core to the function of anyone's economy.
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#58Earlier 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.
Politicians have been automated through a combination of polling data and lobbyist checks since B. Clinton.
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#59Earlier 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 think you can get subcontractors that specifically provide cleared janitors. (The same way that for example the NSA famously uses cleared contractors for things like IT.)
But anyway, Docusign surely isn't an example of such a company or agency.
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#60For 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…
Don’t forget that signing is primarily a legal activity. Every jurisdiction handle it differently, and it’s important to be able to articulate what your product can and can’t do.
This was particularly relevant during the dark days of COVID lockdowns and quarantined, where those laws and practices were tested to their limits.
They likely outsource a lot of that regional work, and do so on an ad hoc basis, but they still need knowledgeable people to coordinate it.