"As of January 31, 2022, we had 7,461 employees, of which approximately 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative. We had approximately 69% of our employees based in the U.S. and the remainder in international locations."
Ratios like this are fairly common.
I think the confusion comes from engineers who look at a SaaS and assume it's mostly engineers like themselves. Engineering is a small portion of the headcount.
A lot of customer-related needs scale with the number of customers. Any company with a huge number of customers is going to have a lot of headcount related to dealing with customers.
How many sales/support reps does your $5/month pay for?
For some, the confusion comes from "wow, that's about half the headcount that Microsoft had when I started in the mid-90s, and MSFT was building, selling, and supporting Windows, Visual Studio, Office,..." Perhaps DocuSign's products are, in fact, about half of Microsoft's big three products, but of what I know of DocuSign it's still a big number to me.
Computer/Online service usage growth: a lot more!
Unless you are Google, which is then again where a lot of people in engineering can get confused as most companies don't hate their users quite as much as Google ;P.
1500 developers for a click to sign platform? Competitors have done it with 1% of that or less.
Not quite. 1500 people in "Engineering, product development, and customer success", so not just engineering.
customer operations is probably the short term customer interactions: support tickets, integration support, help desk, etc.
If I -also- recall, When I did an Auth0 integration (a few years before that) I worked with a similar 'Customer Success' specialist while evaluating for an integration.
I think this is the trade-off that's happening; By putting integration support under a 'marketing' budget rather than a 'support' budget, it allows for a happier adopting customer base.
I must add however; those examples stand out to me not because it was 'sales-y' but because they were extremely memorable times of a vendor team working very hard to lead our teams into a pit of success. The best analogy I can think of is the difference between someone on a call giving a vague phrase you have to search through API docs for, vs a direct link to documentation complete with verbose-yet-sane examples.
"Success" is just a a smarmy word for "sales and support".
Customer operations: ?? No idea never heard the term