How To "Guesstimate" The Number of RAs

I can not do this myself as I am a victim of a previous RA, but I wonder what would happen if a person used a wild card search "," in the IBM directory name field (use to be called Blue pages,) to search for . in the United States . How many names would come back meeting that criteria? You could also refined the search to regular employees, this would exclude contractors. This would establish a baseline. And if you did it periodically ( monthly & quarterly) you could see trends which would provide some anecdotal information of the impact of RAs on the IBM US employee population. A programmer or Data Base Administrator might have a better idea on how to gather this data for analysis

One could also do the same for a different geography , say for example India.

Just a thought.

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Not sure all the work (and risk) would really be worth it or give much insight to US RA count. There is a 500 name limit on simple download from regular access to BluePages, so assuming US headcount is in the 80,000 - 90,000 range, would need to do some 160 to 180 queries to download all. And would still need to filter out all the 'functional' IDs which many look like a person ID, and would not be able to tell if there were a 1000 new hires who are just out of college and 1000 RA's, since total would not change. People retire, quit, raise family, or get another job all the time so those would all be decreases. Very possible that someone running large number of download queries against the IBM directory with US only filters & trying to filter out functional IDs would trigger someone to investigate... Maybe admin who had direct access to the database might be able to pull in a single query, but would be big risk if some Corp security protocol found that query. Not sure how you could answer that question from your manager : "Hey Joe, Just got call from Corp Security Team that you ran this query against the Bluepages database...."

@cfn are you guessing or have you seen direct evidence that all queries in blue pages are logged?

Well.. it only means more H1Bs and empolyees in India

No way . DB under strict control . All queries are logged .

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How To "Guesstimate" The Number of RAs

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