Ratio of IT Department Workers To Overall Employees?

An anonymous reader writes "I was recently talking to a friend about the Fortune 100 company she works for in IT. She told me the company has 35,000 employees, including over 5,000 IT employees — and it's not a web firm. It has numerous consultants doing IT work as well. To me, from a background where my last job had 50 IT employees and 1,000 total, a 1-in-7 ratio of IT employees seems extremely high. Yet she mentioned even simple changes to systems/software take over six months. So, what ratio does your company have, and what is reasonable? How much does this differ by industry?" I'd be interested to see how much it differs by OS platform as well.

Comments

Re:no set ratio

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I know it's a joke on the Java logo, but really, I wouldn't rely on a Java developer for anything critical.

Likewise, a C++ developer is completely useless. Much better to have a developer who builds solutions with whichever tool is suited to the job; in the right environment, it's a simple perl script.