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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?

#101

Post by dominotw »

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.

This only works if incumbent is immune from competition due to regulatory capture and other roadblocks for new entrants. eg: healthinsurance cartels.

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

#102

Post by subsubzero »

babyshake wrote: post #29
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.

I feel like both sides think this,

Engineer - Our company is so good word of mouth should be enough to bring in sales, if we need any more lets look to AI for a solution.

Sales - We bring in the money, all engineers do is cost the company money, we could probably run the app/develop the product on a skeleton crew, can't wait for AI to make those jobs obsolete!

Truth - Both engineers and sales are hugely successful to any companies strategy and AI isn't taking anyone's(engineer or sales) jobs not for a long time :)

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

#103

Post by pclmulqdq »

MattGaiser wrote: post #93
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.

While ironically barreling towards many of us at high speed. White collar tech workers are likely to face the worst of the layoffs in this round of economic troubles.

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

#104

Post by floor2 »

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.

So the value the sales people provided was successfully bribing the executives.

You're not exactly wrong here, but many that's a kinda hilarious example. AI doesn't yet know how to operate in the grey area of not-quite-illegal bribery.

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

#105

Post by tecleandor »

jcims wrote: post #47
aendruk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

sorry you probably need to be logged in. it's a canned search to people saying they currently work at DocuSign (6300 results iirc)

The LinkedIn Premium Insights section for Docusign shows almost 9k employees with this distribution:

https://i.postimg.cc/DZKS1vK6/Screenshot-2022-09-28-23-18-57...

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

#106

Post by chrisseaton »

mcculley wrote: post #82
chrisseaton wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

But it’s the same clearance process and standard if you’re outsourced or not - they don’t do anything extra if you’re inside a service.

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

#107

Post by mrb »

woooooo wrote: post #72
mrb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 ;)

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

#108

Post by fallingknife »

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…

I have personally seen empire building at companies as early as series B. It definitely happens, especially in the weird VC ecosystem where raising the next round is entirely dependent on revenue growth rather than profitability, which is always just assumed will come eventually with scale.

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

#109

Post by quickthrowman »

babyshake wrote: post #29
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.

B2B sales are generally relationship based, even inside sales. I don’t see a chatbot developing a relationship with a human customer.

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

#110

Post by mcculley »

chrisseaton wrote: post #106
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.

But it’s the same clearance process and standard if you’re outsourced or not - they don’t do anything extra if you’re inside a service.

This has not been my experience. I was FSO for my organization. I was responsible for periodic training and internal audits. I have no way to know how well any other FSO or any other organization ran their periodic training and internal audits.

Yes, the check by the government is the same.

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