Considering the verticals they're in, they probably need to deal with a whole buncha legal requirements. Different legal requirements from different jurisdictions, many of which are devolved to independent standards bodies. I'm sure that adds some body count.

Is this true? I don’t think their product offering varies by jurisdiction. At least not in my experience as an attorney.

The fine print that we never read may well vary ... of course you are an attorney, so maybe you do read it!

While Cisco is not Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, or Facebook, it consistently puts up numbers worthy of envy by most others:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CSCO/cisco/net-pro...

Good question. I've seen less than 300 employees produce self-driving software (on the road today, not PoC level stuff).

I'd imagine the ratio of post sales support staff is higher than normal with them. Either technical or, as someone else mentioned, legal. Docusign only makes sense as a product if it is quick and easy to use. They need to help customers clear any hurdles fast.

Anecdotally, I've seen an increasing trend of bloated engineering orgs across startups. Presumably this is motivated in part by a desire to be perceived as an innovative "Tech" company amongst investors.

I don't think it's a fair assumption that only sales/marketing orgs are oversized anymore. Oversized engineering orgs also lead to oversized opex spend due to added difficulty in having ~1k engineers contribute to a common code base.

Yea I'm seeing this. Lot of 'lets throw more eng fte's' on this problem rather than trying to make existing more productive. This will have to change.

100%, what I have seen is alot of companies are trying to emulate Google's laid back culture in shipping products. The problem with this is Google is one of the most successful monopolies ever created. Alot of these tech companies are not, but they emulate the perks and wlb that google has which leads to situations like what we are seeing now.

This comment reminded me of a time long ago when I worked at a middle of the road startup with ~100MM in revenue, ~300 employees, and a margin of ~30-40%. On net the company lost money, and probably had a gross profit of ~200k per employee.

A particular principal engineer was prone to arguing that Engineers should be getting paid between half a million and a million per year. On the basis that our contributions were much greater than what we were paid. That Engineer is a CTO now.

> That Engineer is a CTO now.

Hopefully they took some business classes between then and now.