Having worked at IBM for 20 years, I have some insight into what was going on within the company.  During the early 90’s IBM had approximately 400,000 employees world wide — 250,000 of those employees were within the U.S.  Around 1993 Lou Gershner took the helm and became the grand hatchet man!!  Within about 1-1.5 years he shaved 150,000 employees from the rolls — we were down to ~250K total.

Now today IBM is back up to about 400K employees world wide.  However, less than 100K of those jobs are in the U.S.!!  What happened you ask?  A LOT of American jobs went to India and China!!  They started moving jobs to Russia, but found they were too expensive — ~$25K/year!!  I personally talked to Indian technical people with masters degrees who were paid less than $20K/year.  And when they try to get a job within the U.S, they don’t get paid any more!!?  (Now you see why they have 6-10 people in one apartment here.)

Read the numbers and activity over the past several years here.

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