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DocuSign to lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 700 employees

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21–30 of 81 posts

Re: DocuSign to lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 700 employees

#21

It's going to take a long time for tech compensation to recover. Even if the stock market recovers, the wages will be lower. All the laid off employees will take low compensation somewhere. Every time a good opportunity opens up (1+ year from now), all these low comp people will jump at it, suppressing the wage of that job. Hard to imagine how long it will take for that effect to disappear, need a stock market boom o…

Is the stock market really needing to recover? I don't pay much attention to it but whenever I look stocks and indexes they seem to have gone down a little but not to pre-pandemic levels. What am I missing?

Re: DocuSign to lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 700 employees

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd also be floored by how terrible their support is. I had to send three emails to get a sales rep to finally respond to a question (i'm an enterprise customer)

Out of curiosity, have you explored alternatives? I'm curious how sticky these relationships are.

[deleted]

Re: DocuSign to lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 700 employees

#23

At first it seemed like the layoffs were legitimately needed by some companies. But now it feels like "this is a good time" is the reason du jour. An excuse to cut some projects that haven't panned out, dump a bunch of lower performers, and general other cleanup. DocuSign may have laid-off 700 people, but they have 162 open jobs and most of those list "multiple locations" which probably means they will hire more than…

Hope the employees form trade unions and workers' councils to help stop this bullshit.

Look at DigitalOcean - literally doing "layoffs" whilst shifting hiring to Pakistan: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/15/digitalocean_layoffs/

Re: DocuSign to lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 700 employees

#24
post #18
post #3

I feel bad for the people being laid off, but I'm floored by the size of these companies. I know there are always lots of people in sales & support, and some "overhead" positions, and you multiply by some factor for an international presence. But still... even with all that... for the services DocSign provides... how can they possibly need over 7000 people?

If you were a docusign top manager, would you rather be a humble manager in a corner office with a few reports, or a transformative SVP boldly leading an army of 7000 people into the era of AI technologies?

Inspirational!

Re: DocuSign to lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 700 employees

#25

At first it seemed like the layoffs were legitimately needed by some companies. But now it feels like "this is a good time" is the reason du jour. An excuse to cut some projects that haven't panned out, dump a bunch of lower performers, and general other cleanup. DocuSign may have laid-off 700 people, but they have 162 open jobs and most of those list "multiple locations" which probably means they will hire more than…

> dump a bunch of lower performers

I don't think this part is how companies are actually doing

Re: DocuSign to lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 700 employees

#26
post #3

I feel bad for the people being laid off, but I'm floored by the size of these companies. I know there are always lots of people in sales & support, and some "overhead" positions, and you multiply by some factor for an international presence. But still... even with all that... for the services DocSign provides... how can they possibly need over 7000 people?

> ... but I'm floored by the size of these companies...

> But still... even with all that... for the services DocSign provides... how can they possibly need over 7000 people?

I don't know. It's a ~15 billion market cap. business. Is it surprising that it has thousands of employees?

The undertone of these comments, even if unintended, is these business are bloated, wasteful, and there's judgement on the skills of the engineers (e.g. Twitter's case, look how well it still runs with no engineers!) working there.

It's the same boring take of Instagram and WhatsApp before they were bought and had to deal with legal, and abuse, and international regulations, and and and were ran with a team of less than 10.

Re: DocuSign to lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 700 employees

#27

At first it seemed like the layoffs were legitimately needed by some companies. But now it feels like "this is a good time" is the reason du jour. An excuse to cut some projects that haven't panned out, dump a bunch of lower performers, and general other cleanup. DocuSign may have laid-off 700 people, but they have 162 open jobs and most of those list "multiple locations" which probably means they will hire more than…

> most of those list "multiple locations" which probably means they will hire more than one of each role

I would have assumed they are just open to more locations, not multiple headcount

Re: DocuSign to lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 700 employees

#28
post #3

I feel bad for the people being laid off, but I'm floored by the size of these companies. I know there are always lots of people in sales & support, and some "overhead" positions, and you multiply by some factor for an international presence. But still... even with all that... for the services DocSign provides... how can they possibly need over 7000 people?

I assume a whole lot og the 7000 are talking with government, lawyers, etc. DocuSign has to make sure they are legally in the ok and have to comply with every applicable government they have a client in/might have a client in.

Re: DocuSign to lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 700 employees

#30

At first it seemed like the layoffs were legitimately needed by some companies. But now it feels like "this is a good time" is the reason du jour. An excuse to cut some projects that haven't panned out, dump a bunch of lower performers, and general other cleanup. DocuSign may have laid-off 700 people, but they have 162 open jobs and most of those list "multiple locations" which probably means they will hire more than…

Hope the employees form trade unions and workers' councils to help stop this bullshit. Look at DigitalOcean - literally doing "layoffs" whilst shifting hiring to Pakistan: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/15/digitalocean_layoffs/

That's the price of real remote work culture which started in honest during the pandemic. I'm seeing US based employees replaced by LATAM based one. This is not the outsourcing scare of the 00's, this is real and it works very well.
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