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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

Man there is some serious bloat in most tech companies. Why on earth does Docusign need 7000+ employees?

Internal fiefdoms could be a component.

Let's Encrypt has a staff of 16. I'm not unsympathetic to sales, marketing, DevRel, etc (ongoing BAU and solid growth are both crucial to an established enterprise) but a gap of low teens to 7000 people for using emails to proof identity and store documents for retention periods? Come onnnnnnn.

It's truly insane how much the success of leadership is measured by the size of recursive reports. It's as asinine as the "use it or lose it" budgeting strategy.

If one of the criteria for your success as a manager is “managed a team of size X”, it stands to reason that you would want to increase that X as much as possible.

Yep, the existence of the incentive is undeniable, the question is why is this an incentive when it leads to cancerous growth within organisations, and is generally detached from any specific business outcome.

An internal fiefdom is something you expect at IBM. Lunacy if DocuSign is allowing that to happen.

Why is IBM special in this regard? Fiefdoms appear in any organization larger than a few dozen people.

IBM is a place where people go and rot in a cubicle for 40 years and then retire. Fiefdoms are a natural consequences. Companies like DocuSign have turnover and growth such that it becomes somewhat more difficult to build fiefdoms.

They're everywhere at most companies, sometimes in non obvious ways.

For instance, marketing sometimes has its own developer / engineering teams, rather than running their work through the engineering org. Thats an example.

Taking into account what Docusign are doing, they probably need legal in retainer for every single of the 180 countries they sell to. How many languages do they need to support in the software? And don't forget sales. Stuff adds add quickly. Then, remember, productivity is sub-linear with headcount.

I'm very curios how many developers DocuSign has.

At Bulksign https://bulksign.com, we're building a digital signatures platform which has comparable features with a tiny team.

Lil bit of feedback, your site _really_ doesn't read well on ultrawide :)

Thank you for providing feedback, we will improve UW support for the landing page.

The site isn’t responsive in general. You really need a designer.

I haven’t looked at your site, but please, please, have a good export/bulk download option.

DocuSign and HelloSign are terrible in this respect. Just give me a simple, straightforward way (Ie couple clicks max) to dump every single signed document and their metadata so I can pass it to auditors. That would be a great feature.

Yes, we actually have a mass download application (it's Windows only so far) which downloads all signed PDF files.

https://bulksign.com/docs/EnvelopeDownloader.htm

That’s great. I would suggest you also look at a Google Takeout approach which is just a download from your servers rather than having to run a client. But I definitely appreciate the windows option more than what your competitors provide.

You need to send them a thank-you note for literally doing all the hard work for you. I rejected the idea of building my own signing product simply because I like to stay small and didn't have the ability to hire the legal and regulatory firepower to make it a trustworthy concept. They've paved the way for you, providing gentle massages and tasty snacks while they were at it. You're welcome!

I can tell your tiny team doesn't include any designers.

I don't know if it accounts for all 7000, but sales, legal, and support would account for quite a bit. Docusign is definitely a company that needs rock solid legal and support teams.

You're completely right. And you forgot to include international issues, if that's part of their business model. But 7,000.

Also, at this point I feel they could coast a bit on the sales. They are the standard in the USA, period. IMHO the service is suitably viral and must sell itself in large part. (I could be way off on the last assumption.)

They want sales involved for any purchase over £2k per annum, and I suspect it's because actually a lot of their revenue comes from the sort of order sizes and software integrations you only achieve from having account managers and support staff asking a lot of questions about their business process and software platforms, and then fielding questions from legal.

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