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Businesses Technology

DocuSign To Lay Off 6% of Workforce, or About 440 Jobs (cnbc.com) 30

DocuSign will cut 6% of its workforce, it said Tuesday, as part of a restructuring plan that aims to improve the company's "financial and operational efficiency." CNBC: The online signature provider said the majority of the employees impacted by the layoffs will be within its sales and marketing organizations. DocuSign employs 7,336 workers, according to its most recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which means the cuts will affect around 440 jobs. DocuSign said the restructuring plan will be largely complete by the end of its second fiscal quarter of 2025, according to the release. The company added that it expects to "meet or exceed" its fourth-quarter and fiscal-2024 guidance that it outlined in a release in December.
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DocuSign To Lay Off 6% of Workforce, or About 440 Jobs

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  • by VampireByte ( 447578 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @11:11AM (#64219436) Homepage

    Dear Employee,
    You've been laid off. Please acknowledge in the attached document via DocuSign.
    Sincerely,
    Mystock Justwentup, Mgr.

  • Frankly... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @11:21AM (#64219446) Homepage

    ... I'm impressed they managed to make a viable business model out of this in the first place. You'd think it would be something built into MS Office via Outlook or LibreOffice by now.

    • Well, it's kinda built into PDF generators. At least the ones I've used have signature box thingy that looks about as legally strong as DocuSign (which is to say, not at all). I guess suits still want to "partner" with another suit. That figures, looking at them. They look like they "partner" a lot.
      • by Pascoea ( 968200 )

        (which is to say, not at all).

        Actual lawyers disagree with you: https://www.rocketlawyer.com/b... [rocketlawyer.com]

        Copying and pasting a picture of your signature in a PDF likely isn't going to hold up. But I'm sure Docusign employs a lawyer or two, and I'm sure those lawyers have ensured that their systems comply with the points outlined in the link. The two things aren't the same.

    • ... I'm impressed they managed to make a viable business model out of this in the first place. You'd think it would be something built into MS Office via Outlook or LibreOffice by now.

      You're correct, but it's an interesting post to read on a site like Slashdot... one that tends to poo-poo Microsoft products, especially Outlook.
      What any esignature product includes is a disinterested third party collecting manifest info. People around here might cry foul for that information being collected by the likes of Microsoft........ ;-)

    • Re:Frankly... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bussdriver ( 620565 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @11:46AM (#64219500)

      The other lay offs I'm skeptical about and think it's the modern MBA religion at work undermining long term business health for short term gains but THIS time it sounds sensible... why does their business have so many employees? Are they all marketing? The service they provide seems more redundant than their employees.

    • ... I'm impressed they managed to make a viable business model out of this in the first place.

      PHBs likely looked at it as a way to mitigate risk. If we track the digital signatures and someone sues saying "That's not my signature, you helped them steal my identity!" then we're liable, but if we use a third party to track digital signatures then they're liable and we can get a nice payout for them violating our service contract and putting our clients at risk.

    • I've used it pretty heavily for house sales. There are a few services that all do similar things, with DocuSign being slightly more expensive than most. I view e signature service to be approaching a commodity service, which means it will be hard for any one company to dominate and we'll see a market more like Notary service where anyone who is properly registered can do it.

    • Part of it is.

      Digital signature support is pretty widespread across productivity software. Where the fun begins is managing the signing keys.

      Docusign isn't really selling the signature feature(indeed, to be worth using, they pretty much have to use the standardized options mentioned in the various standards that give e-signatures legal force); they're selling abstracting the key management away from you; and the service of offering a 'free' barebones setup that the people you send forms to can use to
  • by dbialac ( 320955 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @12:05PM (#64219568)
    These "restructuring" processes are always about the same thing: can we get by without some of these people. I'm watching one of my clients "restructure" by getting rid of the expensive people who have all of the knowledge of how their systems works (both corporate processes and tech processes). It's like management doesn't get that making a reasonable and steady profit is fine. You don't have to constantly lay people off to get there. Companies used to not do that prior to the 80s and they'd usually get along just fine. They'd keep themselves funded through a drop in revenue until the revenue came back, which after a recession it typically did.
  • It's not security, it's the *appearance* of security.

    And therefore a bloody great waste of everyone's time.
  • by kenh ( 9056 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @02:15PM (#64219992) Homepage Journal

    DocuSign employs 7,336 workers

    What in the world are they doing at DocuSign that required over seven thousand employees?

    • Re:What hte hell... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RedK ( 112790 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @02:54PM (#64220130)

      Everytime these layoff stories come up, I'm amazed at how no one bats an eye at these bloated employee counts, vs what the product actually is.

      By contrast, my first job was an ISP that covered thousands of square kilometers of area, offered business and residential Internet service from access to hosting, with its own AS number, and we were 2000 total.

      Then you get a single website with a single purpose, and there's 10,000 of them working on it.

    • Sales and localization I guess? I must admit I was pretty surprised with how many people it was, too.
  • So about 7333 employees? Seems way beyond bloated for a edocument service...
  • by mhocker ( 607466 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @02:23PM (#64220014)

    I'm the unfortunate recipient of many "DocuSign requests" as part of my job. Between duplicate messages, constant nagging to create an account and weird senders that aren't in my address book, I find the product to be unnecessarily complex and overwrought for what I can easily accomplish with Preview.app and the signature tool on a PDF.

    How this company manages to employ (for the moment) over 7000 people is beyond me. I only found this out when I read about the layoffs. I figured it might be a tiny little startup with 100 people max, but seven THOUSAND. Bonkers.

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