Commenting on staffing cuts at Austin (CI No 2,435), Jerry Carlson, RS/6000 vice-president and site general manager at IBM Corp in Austin, says staffing levels have been held at around 7,000 regular employees since 1986. We’ve added immensely in AIX, OS/2 and RISC, but reduced manufacturing and indirect support structure staffing, he said. But above that there is a large and flexible pool of freelance contractors, the number of which swelled to accomodate the work on AIX 4.0, but which has now been reduced. Some full-time AIX staff have been shifted to Lee Reiswig’s group to work on Distributed Computing Environment for OS/2. And in the words of Bill Colton, general manager, RISC workstations, there have also been some non-voluntary separations but he declined to give any numbers.
