Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 166 posts

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

#151

Post by Spooky23 »

adamckay wrote: post #119
mrb wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

At that point why would you even have AI sales? If this tech is going to be so amazing, it'll be better served by being a procurement/buyer system. "Hey AI, what CRM system should I use [based on all the knowledge you have of my business already]?"

Azure chatbot: Dynamics E7

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

#152

Post by Spooky23 »

nradov wrote: post #35
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.

Doubt it. Companies have been using chatbots with NLP for years. This only occasionally works to refer customers with technical support questions to relevant knowledge base articles. Mostly they're just a waste of time. Enterprise customers tend to have more complex support issues.

Chatbots exist to waste time to divert calls. There’s a high probability you’ll give up and not bother calling.

Only a moron would put them in front of a sale.

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

#153

Post by [deleted] »

giantg2 wrote: post #147
conductr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the user responsible for the "Docu" part and they only facilitate the "Sign" part? Point being, it's up to the users to figure out if signatures on a digital platform will be legal or not in their jurisdiction. DocuSign probably has some fine print explicitly stating they're not responsible for improper use.

It's likely they still have to deal with law suits, at least until the judge rules on the fine print. It wouldn't surprise me if they have legal/expert support for certain cases. The last thing you want is some dumb client losing a case that creates precedent which ruins your business model.

[deleted]

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

#154

Post by Spooky23 »

mikestew wrote: post #30
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Microsoft always sold through the channel. There were probably a half million people selling Microsoft stuff in the 90s.

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

#155

Post by Spooky23 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #103
MattGaiser wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. The days of $500k for doing nothing are ending soon.

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

#156

Post by conductr »

Spooky23 wrote: post #149
conductr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the user responsible for the "Docu" part and they only facilitate the "Sign" part? Point being, it's up to the users to figure out if signatures on a digital platform will be legal or not in their jurisdiction. DocuSign probably has some fine print explicitly stating they're not responsible for improper use.

They do more than sign, they manage the process and lifecycle of agreements. You can buy a turnkey loan solution for example from them.

They help you manage the workflow of documents. As say a car dealership using docusign, you still provide the documents and actually have to use their tools to make the workflows unless you pay them to help. I don’t think they offer to actually write the contracts. You’d hire a local attorney or just digitize what you already have. That’s been my experience after a couple enterprise level deployments. I could be wrong and we just didn’t need it.

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

#157

Post by quickthrower2 »

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: Churnbusters

Customer operations: ?? No idea never heard the term

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

#158

Post by MichaelZuo »

mcculley wrote: post #52
chrisseaton wrote: post #43

Earlier 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.)

Aren't there companies specializing in providing top secret cleared service staff, such as janitors?

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

#159

Post by globular-toast »

medstrom wrote: post #120
globular-toast wrote: post #94

What does "steelman" mean in this context?

Basically, it means "explain". The connotation is the opposite of straw-man, so OP wants people to start from the assumption that it's true they need all those 7,400 employees, and explain why this would be the case. OP is not looking for cynical explanations such as that they only have so many employees due to incompetence.

"Explain" was the only possibility I came up with and was wondering how on earth OP got an autocomplete error to the word "steelman".

What a grossly unnecessary word.

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

#160

Post by ummonk »

lupire wrote: post #87
ummonk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine a highly successful SaaS company being able to maintain a <10% headcount

B2B vs low-price B2C. How many sales/support reps does your $5/month pay for?

Which highly successful SaaS company does exclusively low-price B2C?
Post reply on HN