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Comment by negamax | Hacker News Reader

According to article 'One analyst has estimated that IBM will cut 13,000 of its more than 434,000 workers'.

Not sure how many (what percentage) is in India and how many are affected.

IBM is no longer a USA company and has not been for some time, logic would dictate that if they've only got ten thousand or so employees left in the USA, if they plan to downsize 13K, at least some citizens of India are going to have to go. They'll (probably) never get rid of the local USA sales force and some service techs, so by definition layoffs will now start to happen in India.

GE is the same way, as are some other former USA companies, when all the Americans are fired you have to begin firing in India and China, which is new to those areas.

Now if they really wanted inhumane, they'd make the Indian workers train their replacements, then fire them.

The unofficial IBM union (http://www.endicottalliance.org/) estimates there to be ~66,000 FTE in the USA.

That's interesting, I was linear extrapolating from continuous losses around the last time an employer was a customer of IBM, leading me to think they're down to almost zero by now. The loss rate isn't as linear as expected.

Most IBM employees are in India, over the years they've consistently trimmed their US workforce (got the treatment) to the point that only the research arm and a relatively small consulting staff and management remains US employees.

I suspect that is how they've been able to impress financially given all the multimillion dollar troubled projects they've overseen. Should be interesting times to come. Apparently Watson is now the great software hope, we'll see.

This is not actually true. The unofficial IBM union (http://www.endicottalliance.org/) estimates there to be ~66,000 FTE in the USA.

What is "not actually true"? OP's comment was not "there are no estimates that there are 66,000 FTE US IBMers."

"...only the research arm and a relatively small consulting staff and management remains US employees."

There are hardware and software engineers throughout the USA. I also wouldn't call 66,000 people relatively small.

Before replying I looked at your profile and read some of your previous posts. It is clear that you are somehow knowledgable on all things blue. This may be just due to your geography or because of more concrete connections. Whatever the case 66,000 is relatively small to the IBM of yester-day/year/decade. I was an IBMer in the 00s and 66,000 is smaller than it used to be. Moreover it is a lot smaller than how people remember the mighty Big Blue. I can not imagine any IBMer saying that number was not relatively small unless they had just finished on-boarding.

Do you know what percentage of these HW/SW engineers are in research? (i have no idea)

IBM has around 120,000 employees in India, around 90,000 in the US and around 20,000 in the UK. Around 35 billion dollars of IBM's revenue ( ie: around 35% )comes from IBM India.

If they cutting in low cost centers, then you can imagine, how bad the things are.

I'm not so sure. IBM seems to hire really cheap developers in India, so it could be they've realized they need to hire better engineers in the first place.

434 THOUSAND workers is incredible.

What you could you possibly do with so many people!

Need a big army to enforce all the patents and extort money!

Estimated is not the actual amount, I read the estimate and they are either high or lower. Cutting 3% of your workforce is not great.. but it's not an actual massacre.

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