Where do they get this stuff?

In the "if it's on the internet, it must be true?" category is this article and quote from it-director.com (Malik Arjun originally brought the article to my attention)

The ratio of testers to programmers is now 3:1. This has given Microsoft another headache as they try and recruit good testers with the technical and personal ability to winkle out software bugs. Lack of resources in the traditional heartlands of Redmond, WA, have lead to the off shoring of a lot of this work to Microsoft in India.

I know that at many companies, that three devs to every tester is a typical ratio, but that's not what the ratio is at Microsoft. But, if you read the above carefully, it says that MS has three testers for every developer - and that ratio is also quite wrong.

The ratio varies slightly across the company (there's no set policy), but company-wide, it's about 1:1. Even with a 1:1 ratio, that's a lot of testers. I'm not even sure what the work a team with a 3:1 test to developer ratio would look like.

On a side note, this could be the first time I've seen the word "winkle" used in the same sentence with "technical" and "software".