A Compensation Commitment

[krrisis]

Hey Loie,

Great to see this written out here, and thank you for all the time you’ve already invested in this.
Some thoughts that pop up while reading.

This document contains some solid arguments on why we need to be more consistent on how we pay DAO contributors. However, I don’t think this needs to be a proposal of any kind at this point, but I think it’s a great start for a framework and it will help establish the people ops team in DAO Ops as the team to consult for any hire.

DAO Ops is the workstream that services the rest of the DAO in its operational needs and I hope everyone will come to you & saf for support and advice. So to me this is not a proposal, this is just part of your mandate and domain. Workstreams should follow the advice process when it comes to the topic of compensation, but we can and should not impose any guidance imo.

As a reminder for anyone reading this, this is how the advice process works:

It comes in many forms, but the essence is consistent: any person can make any decision after seeking advice from 1) everyone who will be meaningfully affected, and 2) people with expertise in the matter.

Advice received must be taken into consideration. The point is not to create a watered-down compromise that accommodates everybody’s wishes. It is about accessing collective wisdom in pursuit of a sound decision. With all the advice and perspectives the decision maker has received, they choose what they believe to be the best course of action.

Advice is simply advice. No colleague, whatever their importance, can tell a decision-maker what to decide.

I think people will happily seek out your advice but not trying to pass a policy or guidance as a proposal will avoid any unnecessary friction or extra overhead, as this guidance will evolve anyway.

Some thoughts on the 4 points:

1. Transparency, all for it. I think we’re already moving this in this direction and hopefully People Ops can discuss with workstreams to already get to this point by the end of this season. In half of the workstreams this info is readily available, in the other half it is not.

@loietaylor

Without a legitimate process for arriving at salary offers, salary transparency could wreak havoc culturally in our teams. Salary has been yolo’d across the DAO.

I strongly agree with this and tbh I think this is already very much the case. Most salaries are transparent already within the DAO, so I think it’s good to have clearer guidance and a strong advice process.

However the big issue at hand is with this proposal not tackled, how do we deal with the current compensation, for existing contributors, as this is already causing tensions? I shared some of my thoughts on this here and would love to continue this discussion. The idea of bands of payments makes total sense to me, but it seems more pressing to give some clear guidance here, especially in the context of the bear market, as we probably also won’t hire that many people in the near future. We have to however deal now with the internal tensions because of salary inequalities and the existing (partlal) opaqueness of the salaries & logic.

2. Global salary benchmark: this makes sense to me, but I see this as an advice process, so I appreciate that there are some benchmarks available.

3. Compensation committee: yes!

4. Denomination in stables: hell yes. I think except for FDD all workstreams do this. I hope a conversation can be started with FDD to move to this simpler model, until we have some more DAO-wide guidance in place. This reduces complexity in accounting, which also means less overhead for FDD (so more focus) and more transparency across the board. (@DisruptionJoe)

So tl;dr - loving all of this, hope this can be the start of a living document in the people ops hub and that all workstreams will seek out the help of this committee for future hires. Looking forward to more input on current compensation across the DAO.