IBM CEO pay jumps 23% in 2023, average employee gets 7%

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/15/ibm_ceo_pay_jumps_23/

by rntn • 2 years ago

51 27 2 years ago

theregister.com

thelastgallon• 2 years ago

7% pay bump seems pretty good.

tokai• 2 years ago

Not at all. Its a relative pay decrease.

ajross• 2 years ago

Relative to what? YoY CPI is around 3% right now.

semiquaver• 2 years ago

Inflation in the last 12 months is 3.2%.

lovedaddy• 2 years ago

Are companies legally obligated to give cost of living? Nope. 7% given the number of layoffs in the tech sector seems amazing in my view.

margorczynski• 2 years ago

Well theoretically both are tied together - the less raise the employee gets the costs are lower thus the profits better which means the CEO is doing a good job.

At the end of the day it is the private property of the shareholders and if they decide the guy they hired does a good job then they can pay him more. Just not sure what is the plan for IBM in the long run, from the outside it looks like some zombie company that is still riding on the fumes when they were a monopoly.

brucethemoose2• 2 years ago

I mean, they have so much potential...

As an example, they have expertise designing huge silicon chips, big iron servers, and fast interconnects. They even made a ternery chip in the past, and plenty of fabrication research. They could absolutely be a horse in the AI accelerator race.

Thats just one example of many.

...But they dont take advantage of any of that, like they are stuck in a corporate quagmire or something.

therealpygon3• 2 years ago

Exactly right. IBM has always been a leader in R&D, almost always 10 to 20 years ahead of anything companies are researching at that time. Their downfall has always been their implementations and their marketing/sales.

Neural chips, quantum computing, ultra high speed fiber, are just a few from the past few years, and just what we hear about. You name it and you can pretty much bet that IBM has something significantly better just sitting on the shelf, so to speak, when it comes to anything AI/server/datacenter, and plenty more.

Their patience and strategy in that area has always been impressive. Knowing you have amazing technology but there is no chance you can make money because of how difficult the thing is to manufacture, so just letting it sit until a worse version reaches scale, trading a smaller leap forward so it can actually be capitalized on is the smart move.

They do it well, but they simply cannot stop tripping themselves every time they try converting that library of advanced technology into revenue generation.

spacephysics2• 2 years ago

AFAIK, IBM’s powerhouse now is their patent library.

WillAdams• 2 years ago

Payslope needs to be a bigger part of such conversations:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/h...

I wish we could get it added to product labeling as is currently done for price per unit weight/count.

npalli• 2 years ago

Are we supposed to be outraged by this? 23% raise seems very reasonable given the average employee at the entire company is getting 7%. The raise is tied to external metrics so really not feeling any need to get agitated.

nylonstrung2• 2 years ago

Yeah that 7% boost also includes every sub-average employee of the company.

What did the top quartile employees get?

spacephysics2• 2 years ago

Agree, this feels like rage bait stats. Anyone who knows about business or at least has tried to run one understands that (typically) the higher up you are in a company, the more high-leverage decisions you make.

So, if the CEO made choices that increase profit by X multiple, bumping a single persons salary (heck even a handful of execs) by a decently high percent is very different than increasing the 10k’s of employees salaries.

Honestly, a 7% average (not even talking median) sounds pretty darn good given the size of them

dagw• 2 years ago

There are lots of ways to raise the avg. salary without giving people a raise. If you fire the lowest earners (and perhaps outsource their jobs to third party contractors) then the avg. salary goes up without having to give anybody a raise.

everforward• 2 years ago

It's basically the same issue as compound interest. Even if both groups got 2% next year, that would practically be 2.5% for the CEOs because of compounding on this. And it continues compounding from there.

It's also aggravating because those numbers look bad adjusted for inflation. Average inflation for 2023 was 4.1%, so inflation-adjusted, employees got a 2.8% raise and the CEO got 18.9%.

Lastly, and most importantly, CEO raises spike atmospherically when the company does well, but they take regular pay cuts, if any, when the company does poorly. It would be one thing if their pay swang wildly both directions, but it starts to look like "privatize the gains, publicize the losses".

When the company does well, most of the gains in pay go to the CEO. When the company does poorly, all the employees have to give stuff up for the company though.

This would bother me a lot less if we also saw "CEO takes 23% pay cut because new initiative failed" articles.

KeplerBoy2• 2 years ago

I expect the CEO to perform above average.

11101010001100• 2 years ago

unless there are multiple CEOs, they perform average, by definition.

KeplerBoy2• 2 years ago

Fair enough. Time to hand out "CEO of the month" trophies to the best CEO in the company.

hiddencost• 2 years ago

Pay dropped for most googlers in satellite offices this year, for reference.

nylonstrung2• 2 years ago

The company beat cash flow projections by $400M and he got $4M.

Doesn't seem that crazy.

therealpygon3• 2 years ago

You dare disagree with the “all ceo pay is bad” narrative? Shame on you.

If split among its employees, they could have given a massive pay raise of at least…(checks calculations)… 0.01 cents per hour. I don’t see how employees can eat with a greedy CEO taking a fraction of a cent like that.

Sarcasm aside, it is beyond me how people are unable to understand that the need to show constant growth and profit is the most detrimental thing to both customer and worker, and not bonuses or golden parachutes.

alephxyz• 2 years ago

Some 282,000 staff were employed at IBM at the end of December 2023, and their average total compensation was $65,463, 6.89 percent higher than at the end of 2022.

Title is wrong. Average employee compensation is 6.89% higher than last year but that doesn't mean employees got 6.89% raises on average. E.g. could be that the thousands of employees they laid off had lower average salaries than remaining ones. According to r/ibm typical raises are closer to 1-4%

IBM CEO pay jumps 23% in 2023, average employee gets 7%

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