CIOs' pay shows they aren't sharing the pain

Last October, there was an article on StarTribune.com, the Web site of the Minneapolis-St. Paul daily, about Ameriprise Financial in Minneapolis having reported a loss of US$70 million for its third quarter. Several readers who posted online comments about the story claimed that the loss had resulted in layoffs and that more were expected. One reader said that the layoffs included "many" technology workers. If that's true, imagine how disgusted those workers would have been if they'd known that their boss was enjoying a compensation package in excess of $6 million.

According to Janco Associates, an IT consulting firm in Utah, the salary of Glen Salow, executive vice president of service delivery and technology at Ameriprise, is $475,000, but financial attaboys have made him a multimillionaire. If that disturbs you, you'll be more disturbed to learn he is hardly unique.

As Computerworld's Patrick Thibodeau reported last week, a recent Janco study found that while IT executives in general are taking a hit because of the economy, some CIOs aren't sharing the pain.

Bob DeRodes recently left his job as CIO at The Home Depot to become chief technology officer at First Data. The offer must have been extremely attractive, given that at Home Depot, he was raking in almost $5.2 million. With a salary of about $700,000, the extras seem fairly generous. Actually, "obscene" is probably a more fitting description, when you consider that the retailer announced in May that it was eliminating 1,300 jobs and closing 15 stores. According to Bloomberg News, Home Depot earlier in the year laid off 500 people from its headquarters and acknowledged that another 1,000 cuts might be made.

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