At 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.
A layoff should be a last resort, sever the arm to save the body type situation.
When projects don't pan out you first try to reallocate those people to more profitable areas. Also use this time to reflect on why these project didn't pan out, learn from those who worked on it and try to avoid making the same mistake in the future.
With bad performers, you put them on a performance improvement plan (pip).
General other cleanup is vague, but in most cases there's a more pragmatic approach.
Again, sometimes things are so bad you have to resort to worse options. We're in a recession, stocks are going to dip, just focus on the fundamentals and it'll be over before you know it. Instead execs are burning their culture and moral for a temporary boost.
Grandparent post didn’t say letting go low performers was an excuse. The comment was saying that the current climate is giving them free reign to make the “plain smart business” move of firing those people without the typical negative reputation associated with mass performance based firings.
Instead of a CEO saying "this project is a mistake, let's do something else". They say "we can't afford these people, oops, that project has to shut down".
So yeah, it's ass covering season for failed CEO iniatives.
That'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.
I'm staunchly anti-union and even I don't see another way forward. It increasingly seems like every company is colluding to set policies, whether it be salary, layoffs, hiring policies, or remote policies. What else is going to bring back your company to the table to negotiate with you as an individual company other than unionizing? I don't think there's any governmental function for legislating away inter-corporation collusion, now or historically.
Im seeing a pattern of tech companies going public the shitting the bed every time. Digitalocean, Rackspace, the list goes on.
Folks, stop doing this. This is squarely the fault of the VC-Startup overleveraged model where the public listing or SalesForce acquisition is the end goal but its about the most disingenuous and disrespectful thing you can do to the user these days because it's so tried and true what happens next.
Haha, sorry, where are my manners.. ahem.. Blood for the blood god!
>> You can count on us be honest, open, and do our best to do what’s right, every day.
Doing what is right is clearly just about optimising shareholder dividends.
Further down:
>> And for that, you’ll be loved by us, our customers, and the world in which we live.
Love is very fleeting, apparently.
Of course, this is all fair game in business. However, companies shouldn't be surprised if many of their staff take a cynic view of their company values.
A lot of executives are using this opportunity to get rid of people pushing social activism thru the corporation or firm.
Social activists at major technology companies have been revealed to be undermining the company or attacking the executive class over unpopular decisions like working with the military (twitter leaks,google, facebook etc.
Many boomer and gen x executives were astonished at the level of activism are cleaning house in their firm or fiefdoms.
I think there’s a balance between activism, and doing the job you were hired for.
I’ve been at a handful of companies, and there’s always some who seem to be more involved in the diversity groups than the actual work their job title shows. And in many cases, me and colleagues (white males, not that it should matter but context is context) felt uneasy about some of the general rhetoric.
Some knew the groups were just lip service, while others saw the groups as enacting global change.
I personally haven’t sorted it out, I’m still thinking about it. But it seems odd how heavy some college curriculum, and high school for that matter (myself in college not long ago, my brother in HS), focus on being an activist.
Sure that’s great to want change in your community, but I feel the desire to be an activist for something was taught over the desire to foster a local, welcoming community.
I 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?
Same here. Of all the software companies, Docusign has the easiest, most straightforward product that is neither resource intensive nor it requires some bleeding edge innovation. So what do all those people do really?..
I will paste my comment from the last time this was asked 4 months ago, an HN thread "Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?" with 159 points [1]:
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.
I assume a whole lot og the 7000 are talking with government, lawyers, etc. DocuSign has to make sure they are legally in the ok and have to comply with every applicable government they have a client in/might have a client in.
If 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?
> ... 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.
Honestly 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.
I 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?
I 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.
That'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.
Enterprise 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.
I 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.
After 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.
You'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)
We 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.
Why 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)
Readit News
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.
How is stopping bad projects, letting go non-performers and cleaning up an excuse and not just plain smart business?
People in this hackernews bubble are seriously disconnected from the real world.
When projects don't pan out you first try to reallocate those people to more profitable areas. Also use this time to reflect on why these project didn't pan out, learn from those who worked on it and try to avoid making the same mistake in the future.
With bad performers, you put them on a performance improvement plan (pip).
General other cleanup is vague, but in most cases there's a more pragmatic approach.
Again, sometimes things are so bad you have to resort to worse options. We're in a recession, stocks are going to dip, just focus on the fundamentals and it'll be over before you know it. Instead execs are burning their culture and moral for a temporary boost.
So yeah, it's ass covering season for failed CEO iniatives.
Look at DigitalOcean - literally doing "layoffs" whilst shifting hiring to Pakistan: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/15/digitalocean_layoffs/
Folks, stop doing this. This is squarely the fault of the VC-Startup overleveraged model where the public listing or SalesForce acquisition is the end goal but its about the most disingenuous and disrespectful thing you can do to the user these days because it's so tried and true what happens next.
Haha, sorry, where are my manners.. ahem.. Blood for the blood god!
They are laying off 350 people mainly UK tech based. At the same time they are still hiring in India.
This seems completely consistent. Layoffs are intended to save money and Pakistani workers are cheaper.
>> You can count on us be honest, open, and do our best to do what’s right, every day.
Doing what is right is clearly just about optimising shareholder dividends.
Further down:
>> And for that, you’ll be loved by us, our customers, and the world in which we live.
Love is very fleeting, apparently.
Of course, this is all fair game in business. However, companies shouldn't be surprised if many of their staff take a cynic view of their company values.
I think it's safe to assume that everyone already knows that "company values" and quotes like the ones you shared are pure PR bullshit.
I would have assumed they are just open to more locations, not multiple headcount
I don't think this part is how companies are actually doing
Social activists at major technology companies have been revealed to be undermining the company or attacking the executive class over unpopular decisions like working with the military (twitter leaks,google, facebook etc.
Many boomer and gen x executives were astonished at the level of activism are cleaning house in their firm or fiefdoms.
I’ve been at a handful of companies, and there’s always some who seem to be more involved in the diversity groups than the actual work their job title shows. And in many cases, me and colleagues (white males, not that it should matter but context is context) felt uneasy about some of the general rhetoric.
Some knew the groups were just lip service, while others saw the groups as enacting global change.
I personally haven’t sorted it out, I’m still thinking about it. But it seems odd how heavy some college curriculum, and high school for that matter (myself in college not long ago, my brother in HS), focus on being an activist.
Sure that’s great to want change in your community, but I feel the desire to be an activist for something was taught over the desire to foster a local, welcoming community.
But still... even with all that... for the services DocSign provides... how can they possibly need over 7000 people?
I will paste my comment from the last time this was asked 4 months ago, an HN thread "Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?" with 159 points [1]:
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33012137
--
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...
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
DocuSign to cut workforce by 9% as part of restructuring plan https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010050
The market still has room to go down, taking the 'tech' bubble with it.