I feel the same way about most big corporations. Tech companies are not immune. I had a FB recruiter once brag to me about their Messenger team occupying a couple floors in Seattle and a couple floors in Menlo Park. Holy hell, what do you do on a project like Messenger with that many devs??
Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
61–70 of 166 posts
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#62For 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.
GPT-3 ain’t buying me a coffee. They’re not inviting me to their Christmas party either.
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
You seriously think a salesperson can be replaced by a chatbot?
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
OK, sure, but handwaving enough, that's true for almost every job that exists today.
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#65I have no horse in this race other than being a Docusign enterprise HIPAA plan customer for my org of ~150 people, but: IME Docusign is absolutely at the tiptop of product quality, documentation, and service for any SAAS company I've ever used in the last 16 years. Whether that requires 0.74, 7.4, or 7.4 million employees is up to them.
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#66Earlier 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.
Why can't a computer program automatically buy tickets for F1 and send them to prospects?
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#67Earlier 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 bet there's some market analysis of SaaS companies showing how differently they can be run. I wonder if it's bimodal - SaaS with 50% sales headcount.
I can't imagine a highly successful SaaS company being able to maintain a <10% headcount
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#68Earlier 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.…
This is also where companies can save a ton of money if they develop tools that allow customer facing employees to do their jobs much more efficiently.
haha, like developing tools that allow remote document signing...
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#69Per 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."
Eng team of 1,500 then, revenue of $1.4m per head
all the heads create value
Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?
#70Earlier 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.
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 larg…
Well, Facebook is pretty good at automated advertising.
Those YouTube ads featuring pitchmen/people could be replaced by perpsnalizedt deepfake for race/gender/style that fits the target.