Yeah that's a bullshit claim right there. IBM might be one of the only companies in the world with O(200K) engineers, and I sincerely hope parent comment doesn't think IBM does CRUD.
What is going to infinity when you are measuring the asymptotic upper bound of IBM's engineer count?
Besides, O(constant) is pretty low.
IBM does six hours of meetings, two hours of CRUD, and then four more hours in the evening fixing a problem the offshore dev team delivered without testing.
And at the same time they managed to ship Watson.
The initial team was less than 15 people.
> "During 2007, the IBM team was given three to five years and a staff of 15 people to solve the problems" [1]
Right! This stabs at the heart of the issue, which is that some engineers gets to play the cool games (in fact very few), while most engineers are answering support tickets or putting out on-call fires. And this is no different than anything else, it's all about who you know.
Regardless of truth - this made me laugh out loud :D