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

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 it to keep growing the org this way.

Docusign has a lot of opportunities to upsell customers on legal services they provide.

You should also consider the scaling cost of internal support. For every 10 FTEs, add a manager. Also add on HR, accounting, janitorial, etc. Easilly 20% of the company might be these sorts of internal support roles.

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."

One common driver of headcount is enterprise sales and support. Once you charge at least $75,000/year, you need to put salespeople on planes, you need to provide actual tech support, and (unless you're disciplined and lucky) you end up with hundreds of features that are only used by one or two big customers each.

Enterprise software is fundamentally a whole different beast. Customers will write big checks, but they expect a lot of different things in return for that money.

I don't know whether this applies to DocuSign.

It's quite easy to figure out if you look at their annual report, for example. [1]

Literally the first two pages of content explain, emphasis mine:

> To address this opportunity, our sales and marketing strategy focuses on businesses at all scales, from global enterprise to local very small businesses (“VSBs”). We rely on our direct sales force and partnerships to sell to enterprises and commercial businesses, and our web-based self-service channel to sell to VSBs, which is the most cost-effective way to reach our smallest customers.

> Hundreds of integrations with other mainstream systems where work gets done, such as applications offered by Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Workday.

> Globally adopted. Our expertise in electronic signature and other agreement technologies is truly global. This is key, given that different regions have different laws, standards and cultural norms. We assist multiple parties in different jurisdictions to complete agreements and other documents in a legally valid manner

> Vertical offerings. We offer enhanced solutions tailored to particular industries, such as financial services, real estate, life sciences, and government. In some cases, these may be variants of a product like DocuSign eSignature —for example, our additional DocuSign eSignature options for assisting with compliance with U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations. In other cases, it may be a distinct product for an industry, such as Rooms for Real Estate, which includes task management, templates, and workflow for real estate transactions.

You can see from their expenses that they spend two and a half times as much on sales and marketing than they do on research and development.

It's very easy to imagine how you could need 2,000 engineers to build and support e.g. 500 different integrations and 50 industry-specific solutions, all of which need to be actively maintained for compatibility. And then an even larger salesforce that is selling to companies literally across the globe. Not to mention the lawyers and legal analysts attached to all of those.

Docusign isn't a mere PDF viewer computer program, it's a business that provides ironclad legal services that are vetted by lawyers and guaranteed for your industry's specific legal needs in the countries where you operate.

[1] https://s22.q4cdn.com/408980645/files/doc_financials/2022/ar...

I 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.

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

Knowing a few people there work there... They have teams that work with specific customers to customize their product. I'm guessing a large client like Google could have a team of 100+ folks alone working on that client (across sales, tech, support).

The other thing is that they do stuff outside of just signing documents. They are a software company. They work in the enterprise space too. That ends up pulling in a ton of people to support those large clients.

Could they cut a lot of folks? Sure. But just about every large company could.

They're mostly sales, marketing, and customer service. Engineering is mostly supporting integrations with every arbitrary platform and CRM they can possible handle.

There is no limit to how high headcount can go, for virtually any business, unless something stops it. That doesn't mean anyone is intentionally padding the rolls, either. There is a certain momentum, as more people requires more supervisors and more support and more support for the support. 7400 people have a lot of company computers/IT, human resources requirements, payroll and accounting, etc. More people "requires" more people, in an ever-increasing spiral of hiring...until suddenly there is a hard stop that requires it to not increase, or even decrease.

I have witnessed this in corporate, startup, university, and governmental organizations, so it's not much to do with the task to be done. More people requires more people, until and unless something else requires that there be less people instead.

For Docusign, we have apparently just encountered that "something else".

I am always amazed when I hear company x laid off 600 workers and I"m like, "how did they have that many people working there?" I know it is probably sales and stuff but it it still seems unreal.

I've never had an office job and so it is like some kind of urban legend for me (Like I grew up in the country so I never knew anyone that actually went to summer camp, so I thought it was a fake thing made up for movies and tv.) Even though I'm nearly 50 I still relate to that tiktok of the woman asking what people do in an office all day https://www.tiktok.com/@mads.ringswaldegan/video/70920553756...

For reference, I've worked in companies of 500-1000 total employees where the companies designed, manufactured, sold and dealt with regulators all for things like artificial hearts (lvads), surgical robotics systems, etc. How is docusign 10x mor complicated?

DocuSign did ~$2.4B annual revenue [1].

So each employee generates ~$320k annual revenue ($2.4B / 7,400), which sounds about right.

SaaS companies typically do low $100,000s per employee per year.

[1] https://www.docusign.com/press-releases/docusign-announces-f...

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??

Look for yourself i guess? (EDIT: need to be logged in)

https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?currentCompa...

'DocuSign' is a company and a product. The scope of the company is much greater than the product. I wouldn't guess less than 3000 for sure.

What to recalibrate on, is that this is what a well funded $580 million revenue per quarter org looks like. You could certainly build a leaner org, with just 50 engineers, and way fewer features, but it's not going to be the industry stronghold that DocuSign is, not without some sort of competitive advantage (like when the Internet was new and you're competing as against companies that haven't digitized yet, but even then).

What does "steelman" mean in this context?

Sometimes, it's just marketing, sales, HR and support. For a B2B, these divisions scale almost linearly with number of paid customers.

Have a read of David Grabber’s essay “On the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, it explains this phenomenon quite well.

Products get complicated when you're trying to be #1 in the world.

It might take you a few months to slap together your MPV with a couple of devs, but several years later you need a 10 person team to work full time on the location autocomplete function because having your location autocomplete be 10% better than a competitor makes you millions of dollars.

Has docusign become what google has to search? Like I say to my insurance agent, “do I need to docusign something”?

Imagine they operate in 150 countries and have 50 team members for each doing sales and support and outreach. It still seems like a lot but being international does add a lot of jobs

I’d assume a large chunk of them are in the field. Having a worldwide network of sales teams, both technical, nontechnical, and in between adds up.

I think there is also certain amount location specific regulatory and marketing work.

They don't have 7,400 engineers, if that is what you were thinking.

That’s mostly sales people.

9% layoff... ~666+ folks. Sad.

wonder what the type of roles are (sales / support) vs eng

This is like still asking why any competent organization still installs adobe acrobat reader by default on like every pc, and has to subsequently patch it every 2 weeks when it has exploits found still after ~25 years. Flash just finally died, and even then organizations turn to pirate builds to support ancient enterprise shitware still in use today.

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.