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Comment by quacker | Hacker News Reader

Wow. 111,800 people is a huge number. That's a whole city looking for work, and over $1 billion saved (in the long run) for each $10000 of employee salary.

> The question I have to ask is why isn't Rometty one of the 110k. IBM has seen 11 straight quarters of declining revenue and it's hemorrhaging customers, according to both my source and Cringely.

Yep.

So what should IBM do here? For one, IBM needs a complete makeover. Why should I pick SoftLayer over AWS, Google, Microsoft, etc? They need a new image, something that will draw customers and something other than being the canonical story of corporate bloat and mismanagement.

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Rometty is the fall person.

Palmisano bailed when he recognized the ship was going down. She got handed the keys to the titanic. IBM has been on this collision course for a decade.

That's not to say she's executing brilliantly (or not), but I don't believe there's anything a new CEO could have done about this mess in the last few years that would have made a difference short-term. The consequences from the last 10 to 15 years of mismanagement were going to be paid for one way or another, sooner rather than later.

Keep in mind that a developer being paid $100K gross actually costs the company way, way more. Health insurance and other benefits, cost of office space, electricity, transportation, and so on. It varies greatly between companies and countries, but it's not unusual to have "man year" cost 2x more than what is actually being paid as direct salary to the employee.

Sure, but for every $100k staffer in the west, there's an Indian IBMer making $10-15k.

Office space+additional overhead could be reduced by remote workers. That would involve transforming management culture though, which is long overdue for it. And I'm not talking about some new crappy book about moving cheese or others of its ilk.

Where are you getting the $1B savings number?

$10000*100000 employeees - I had to think about it too.

Who makes 10k a year?

1 billion saved per 10k of salary. You need to read the parent in context of its parents.

>for each $10000 of employee salary

So a billion saved per 10k of average employee salary, just way of quantifying it in something understandable.

> Who makes 10k a year?

A lot of employees in developing countries in which IBM has a presence.

A better question is, who doesn't make at least 10K per year? Are there many?

If not, then the billion figure represents a reasonable lower bound estimate on the savings.

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