Last week we posted an article about how much money the large tech companies are making, but another really interesting thing to look at is how large their workforce is. Just as with revenues and profits, these numbers can be quite surprising (and impressive).

We used the same group of 15 well-known tech companies that we looked at last week: Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Yahoo.

There are big companies, and there are HUGE companies

No one will deny that Microsoft and Intel are big companies, but just look at HP and IBM. The sheer size of their workforces make the other companies look like small startups. IBM has almost 400k employees! Its HR and accounting departments must have their hands full…

To put the size of the IBM workforce in perspective: IBM has more employees than Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Cisco, Apple, Amazon and Google all put together.

Some other observations:

• Google and Amazon are almost exactly the same size in terms of employees.
• Microsoft has close to three times as many employees as Apple.
• IBM has almost 20 times as many employees as Google (or Amazon).
• HP has more than four times as many employees as Dell.

If you haven’t already, you might want to check out last week’s post about the money these companies pull in.

Data source: Google Finance

All the companies we included in this survey are publicly traded on NYSE/NASDAQ. Although Sun was recently bought by Oracle, we included it anyway.

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