DocuSign to lay off 6% of workforce, or about 440 jobs

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 164 points – DocuSign to lay off 6% of workforce, or about 440 jobs
cnbc.com

DocuSign to lay off 6% of workforce, or about 440 jobs::DocuSign announced Tuesday it will cut 6% of its workforce as part of a restructuring plan

35

I mean, I could see them having a few hundred employees total at DocuSign, but holy crap! What do they all do?

There are infinitely more complex pieces of software out there with less than a tenth of the number of employees.

Sales, marketing and support most likely. It has a massive corporate userbase. I'm guessing the actual tech side of the house is only a small fraction.

They need to employ a small army of handwringing analysts to verify your terrible trackpad and touch screen signatures.

So do these guys wring their hands while analyzing stuff or do they actually analyze handwringing?

My guess is that snorting cocaine while "working" makes that a bit difficult.

I used to work at DS and there was definitely overhiring done during the early pandemic when the stock price was going up. At least three people I know were let go in this round and they were in technical teams, which was surprising.

Holy shit, how many employees does DocuSign need?

I'm no fan of these layoffs, but a company like Docusign having over 7k employees is mind blowing to me. They could probably GET BY with 440 employees and then outsourcing customer service entirely.

Why do they need that many employees?

Spoken like a true CEO. About time for a merger riiight?

No seriously? How many engineers are needed to let people add a signature image to a pdf?

Not 440

Can you imagine how many documents need to be properly accessed and backed up for legal reasons. I have used it for damn near anything. School registration, rental, home buying, legal reasons. There have to be so many redundancies for me and I'm a nobody. Now imagine all that for a modest company? And how many exist. I can see a decent amount of employees to facilitate that.

It’s automated, I don’t see thousands of people in a massive warehouse running around with printed documents filing them in stacks of boxes.

That is not what I was talking about. There are still people that need to monitor the code and the storage spaces. Servers don't just magically have space. Especially if they are doing anything on the cloud. Making them accessable is a database feature that has to be daunting.

You're talking 8,000 employees.

And I'd bet all that server management is done by a subcontractor in the data center (having worked in enterprise for decades, this is how it's done).

FTEs often don't even touch production, they work things out in Test/Pre-prod, then document it, and hand it off to Change Management and their change vendor (those folks in the data center).

Those change engineers do changes for multiple clients, which makes their time less expensive since they're fully utilized.

I mean, 1, if they’re at all competent in their job. 2, if they’re not. Probably a lawyer too, so 3.

Our account manager just tried to wrangle us into 3x as many licenses as we needed. I looked at the numbers and there wasn’t any usage. I think they logged in to sign something over a year ago and that auto-consumed a license.

Spent waaay too much time trying to get them to come up with the right number.

I think their business model is to get as many people licensed as possible even if they aren’t using the product. The steps you need to go through to release a license are odd.

They wanted $30k for like 6k envelopes a year for my company. With Conga Sign, it was less than $5k for UNLIMITED. They didn't adjust pricing with competition. They need to shrink or go extinct.

I need to just filter out layoff news. All these tech layoffs really bug me. Hope we see some startups take off filled with these laid off workers.

I feel much less strongly about them (as in I just care less, they're still still horrible) since I left the industry to start my own business, tbh.