Trying to understand "average productivity" here. The 15K is what an average IT worker produces per year - for example if they were billed out for 1500 hours at 10$ per hour?
That is true. Most companies have bench+overhead and billed resources may be 60% or less of total work force. Average billing works out to $10-15 for the low value high volume work these IT services firms do and that has not changed over the last 20 years or so. What has changed is a bloated middle/senior management which is a drag to the above business model. They did try to move up into consultancy and productised services - which did not really work.