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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?

#71

Post by collyw »

suzzer99 wrote: post #34
brianwawok wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is still mind blowing. 1500 developers for a click to sign platform? Competitors have done it with 1% of that or less.

I've been impressed by Docusign the few times I've had to use it. And I generally hate 95% of the software I come across. Everything seemed to snap into place, was perfectly intuitive. That stuff is easy to get wrong, as evidenced by all the crap out there.

It's not managed to annoy me, which is quite impressive. I never really considered Docusign anything special for usability, until your comment, but that's because it gets out of your road enough not to notice it.

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

#72

Post by woooooo »

mrb wrote: post #54
TillE wrote: post #41

Earlier 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?

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.

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

#73

Post by function_seven »

lupire wrote: post #66
DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How will it determine who gets the tickets? And which event is the most appropriate one for a given prospect? How will it know that the prospect is interested in the first place? Or available? Or worth wooing in this manner?

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

#74

Post by b112 »

KoftaBob wrote: post #53
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.

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…

In other words, the timeline for what you're predicting is much longer than you think it is

Indeed. So many people I knew, thought full self driving, any weather, any road, fully AI, would be here by 2015. Then 20.

I doubt we will have it before 2050.

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

#75

Post by lupire »

groby_b wrote: post #33
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.

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 paying customers, barely distinguishable from a chatbot.

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

#76

Post by awild »

chrisseaton wrote: post #43
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…

Does anyone actually directly employ janitorial staff these days?

I found out yesterday that our facility management is employed with us. But we also handle seriously sensitive data.

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

#77

Post by lupire »

pessimizer wrote: post #58
zachthewf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. The last professions in the world to be automated will be salesperson, politician, and plumber.

Politicians have been automated through a combination of polling data and lobbyist checks since B. Clinton.

Are you saying B Clinton is not a human?

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

#78

Post by b112 »

lupire wrote: post #70
KoftaBob wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you are confusing a call centre employee, who blind calls via auto dialing, and reads a script, with a sales person selling a COTS, and doing inside sales.

There is zero comparison to this and a facebook ad, or targeted marketing.

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

#79

Post by mattacular »

lupire wrote: post #66
DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It could do that part. Making the decision about what to buy, how much of it, and for whom etc would be the types of non-trivial decisions you need your sales AI to make better than a person

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

#80

Post by collyw »

rootusrootus wrote: post #61

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??

Scaling is likely to be the biggest problem, not app development.
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