6 ms·
DocuSign to lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 700 employees
- rybosworld 4y ago7000+ employees for an app that signs documents?
- baal80spam 4y ago6300 now, and I feel like the number should be closer to 630.
- elteto 4y agoSeems very high, yes. My bet most of those are working in compliance/legal stuff. DocuSign is accepted pretty much everywhere.
- x0x0 4y agoThat's not just what DocuSign does, except for their smallest customers.
- Fraaaank 4y agoThat's a bit of an oversimplification to be fair. They offer multiple products (esignature, contract lifecycle management). Does not change that it's still a lot of employees.
- dfadsadsf 4y agoIt's enterprise software. 2/3 of headcount are probably sales, support engineers, deployment, compliance, legal, etc.
- bsder 4y agoEnterprise marketing and sales always takes up a LOT of people. The Enterprise is PROFITABLE. The issue is that normally There Can Be Only One(tm). The "security" companies like Auth0 were worth gigabucks NOT because they had a superior technical solution but because they managed to crack some number of large customers who now were never going to remove that system and would now be a cash cow forevermore.
- dbrueck 4y agoI 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?
- akomtu 4y agoIf 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?
- whitemary 4y agoInspirational!
- havefunbesafe 4y agoAnswer: they don't. Support via docusign is also relatively non-existent.
- Spooky23 4y agoSales and marketing. Docusign has a good sales org that stands out from its competitors.
- ctvo 4y ago> ... 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.
- rvz 4y agoDigital document signing company needing 7,000 employees. Why? The market still has room to go down, taking the 'tech' bubble with it.
- havefunbesafe 4y agoYou'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)
- toomuchtodo 4y agoOut of curiosity, have you explored alternatives? I'm curious how sticky these relationships are.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Foobar8568 4y agoWe generally get support fast, but it's barely beyond canned response. The real problem is more with their API which is not oriented for multi-app integration (or external), you have an user who would need to use one third party app for some activities and DocuSign for another? both app will technically have access to all their documents. Just a security nightmare unless complicating your organization setup and cost.
- jiveturkey 4y agoWhy would a sales rep be in the support chain? I have had decent support from them, and certainly no problem getting attention. I'm _not_ an enterprise customer, just basic. (approx 25 users)
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoIt'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 or low rates again
- lancesells 4y agoIs 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?
- hardware2win 4y agoWhat makes you think that it will recover at all? :)
- ianbutler 4y agoYeah I don't see it. If you're just counting developers there has been less than 10% of the total us developer workforce laid off to date since 2022. This just seems like wishful thinking on the part of business owners. Sorry folks we still cost a premium.
- clavalle 4y agoNot only that, software is a unique sector in which a lot of the capital is in the talent. These companies aren't laying off labor that have few choices. They're budding off knowlegible competetors. If these folks can't find a well paying job it's a very real option to create a well-performing company.
- clavalle 4y agoNothing is more expensive than cheap talent. Besides, the market is still super tight and shows very few signs of loosening. What we're seeing is that the old-guard companies have hit their autumn years. But companies being companies autumn could last for decades. I think we had too much talent dedicated to some of these sectors anyway. There's a lot of interesting problems out there that could use more attention.
- trashtestcrash 4y agoWhy are the majority of these layoffs around the 10% mark?
- orra 4y agoGood question. Best guess: Everybody else is firing 10% of staff, so fewer questions asked.
- Spooky23 4y agoIt’s generally accepted sacrifice to the volcano gods. It’s pretty hard to fuck up the company with a 10% cut, and the investors like it.
- antisthenes 4y agoAn excuse to use the word "decimated".
- mgsk 4y agoI forget where I heard this, but someone put it this way: to the markets, 10% is a positive signal that a company is cutting some cruft, but 25% is a negative signal that a company is in trouble.
- mtmail 4y agoAfter the first dotcom boom I survived two layoff waves of 7%, about 6 months apart. Our branch wasn't loosing money but every office had to report enough employees to headquarters so the 7% can be met because that's the number that was used in the press release and earnings call. As others wrote at the same time company was still hiring (at least engineers) and some marketing positions just moved to an agency which then billed us per hour for the same person.
- ShakataGaNai 4y agoAt 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 one of each role. I noticed the same at Okta's layoff, 300 people cut... but at least a hundred open jobs. And yes, some of this is "rebalancing". Turns out not everything is staying the same after the pandemic shifts to endemic mode. Maybe not all those sales staff (or whatever projects) are still needed. But it still feels like a lot of this is "lets boost the stock value" based logic.
- nivenkos 4y agoHope 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/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/15/digitalocean_layoffs/
- myth_drannon 4y agoThat'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.
- _vbnz 4y agoAs a Europoor it might actually increase our wages at least!
- AlchemistCamp 4y agoWould you be willing to move to Latin America to take advantage of the trend?
- 4y ago
- AngeloAnolin 4y agoI don't quite understand the logic where people being laid off from their positions / responsibilities and the jobs being posted are similar in nature. For one, are you really saving costs when you're losing some individuals with deep knowledge of the job for which you would need to re-train a new individual to come up to the same speed and productivity as with the previous person doing the job? Doesn't this also make productive / talented / hardworking people shy away from your job posting when they know that your company recently laid off employees?
- clavalle 4y agoI have personally been approached by internal recruiters for a position just after the company very publicly laid off people with my title and are going after 'middle management'. I declined. I'm a software architect but I strongly believe that the organization of people is as important as the organization of software. So architects and principals, to be the most effective, should have management authority. Middle management, if done well, makes or breaks mid to large software companies. An organization that doesn't deeply respect that role isn't anywhere I want to be.
- Ekaros 4y agoHonestly 7000 sounds high, but then you need to consider that they have to prove compliance in 188 different countries and 44 languages. And probably need a exactly not small team in each of these. And the customers are enterprise, banks and so on. So everything needs to be negotiated and documented just right and those aren't known to be fast processes. And then you might need separate infra for many of these. Or even many of the customers. In the end it is not complexity of the product itself, but where and how and by whom it is used. And proving that it ticks all the boxes.
- mpwoz 4y agoThis is Docusign’s second round of layoffs in 5 months, they laid off 9% in September: DocuSign to cut workforce by 9% as part of restructuring plan https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010050
- mpwoz 4y agoSince I can’t edit, found the original hn thread DocuSign to cut workforce by 9% as part of restructuring plan https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010050