There are more important things than money to attract talented researchers. The cafeteria at IBM Research - Almaden [1] offered an "IBM Burger" [2]. (I had one, and they were delicious! A big hulking mainframe of a hamburger.) When Sun found out about that, they had their own cafeteria offer a "Sun Burger", in the hopes of attracting better qualified researchers. Cargo cult corporate research menu design at its best!
In the 80s and before IBM was THE place to work. Pretty much like Google or Facebook today. In the 90s they slowly started to cut retirement benefits and other perks and now it's not a great place to work at as far as I know.
