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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?

#91

Post by jdmdmdmdmd »

DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote: post #45
babyshake wrote: post #29

Earlier 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.

Funny to see how little value devs and engineers put on sales people. Enterprise software success depends highly on sales people. Startup success depends highly on marketing. At previous company, SAP flew the CEO and a few others to Monaco for the F1 race. Interesting to see we had SAP and PeopleSoft implemented at the company.

Yup. Devs like to think that sales people don't contribute real value and are basically just marketing, and that's true to a degree, but it's also true that sometimes the entire product doesn't contribute real value either. A senior dev building Uber/delivery clone #1745 run by VC funny money is "contributing" the same as a sales person, no matter how many frameworks and algorithms he uses. (Unless, of course, that algorithm is itself contributing to some efficiency in the deliveries.)

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

#92

Post by jccalhoun »

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/70920553756...

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

#93

Post by MattGaiser »

jdoliner wrote: post #49

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

Unemployment is that foreign to tech people.

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

#95

Post by YakBizzarro »

lupire wrote: post #75
groby_b wrote: post #33

Earlier 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…

Customer support is largely useless today and can be replaced by machine. It only exists because average (dumb) people tolerate a human customer service rep saying "I'm sorry but you're screwed" better than a web page saying it. Salespeople says BS to sign you up, only vaguely coherent, backed by some basic database facts about the product/price, so GPT can handle that. Think about Donald Trump: Huge fan base of payi…

Clearly you have never done or received customer support in a b2b environment. It can be as valuable or even more than the product itself.

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

#96

Post by thedougd »

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…

I bet there are teams for consulting, solutions, and services. "Need help digitally transforming your blah blah blah with Docusign?"

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

#97

Post by MattGaiser »

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…

Aren't sales people also heavily paid in commission? I.e. for a large part, you only pay if they bring in business?

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

#98

Post by mcculley »

ceejayoz wrote: post #86
mcculley wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, NSA’s high profile failure with Booz Allen is a great example of why some things should not be outsourced.

Is it? It's not like the various intelligence agencies haven't had their share of on-the-payroll moles.

In my own experience with such organizations, we were less worried about moles than by inconsistencies in vetting, training, and process.

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

#99

Post by lupire »

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 operations" is actually "customer success operations" -- it's the non-customer facing part of sales and support - the IT systems they use.

"Success" is just a a smarmy word for "sales and support".

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

#100

Post by hotpotamus »

lupire wrote: post #85
mikestew wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Population growth since 1995: 30% Computer/Online service usage growth: a lot more!

How many programmers did Microsoft need for 1 million OS installs vs 1 billion? The reason software can be such a money maker is that the marginal unit costs are close to zero.
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