Proposal “core-salaries-201704“ (Completed)Back

Title:Proposal: Core Team Salaries (April)
Owner:babygiraffe
One-time payment: 397 DASH (11446 USD)
Completed payments: 1 totaling in 397 DASH (0 month remaining)
Payment start/end: 2017-03-21 / 2017-04-19 (added on 2017-03-27)
Votes: 659 Yes / 0 No / 0 Abstain

Proposal description

This is a cross-post from the Dash Forum

This proposal funds the Dash Core Team - including all developers, administrative, and support staff - at market rates excluding benefits. There will be a separate proposal for a proposed expansion of the team, and I'll provide additional context for how these differing proposals intersect and our rationale for these two proposals (instead of the department-level proposals from previous months).

Back in January, the core team proposed - and the network approved - a proposal to fund an HR firm to assess our HR processes and help us transition to a sustainable organization. The highest priority items in the scope of work were role definitions, and determining the market rate for those positions, along with a plan to transition to market rates for our full-time employees as funds became available. You can see the proposal here: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/proposal-admin-hr-consult.12870/

One of the primary reasons for making a transition to market rates was to enable those working for the project to continue to do so continuously, and also to enable us to attract and retain new talent to continue scaling our operations. We simply could not continue bringing on new resources at market rates without first addressing the significant gap to fair pay for existing team members - the team that helped get us where we are today.

Because of the rapid increase in Dash's price, we feel confident that we can already move to full market rates for our full-time contributors. There is no reason to continue paying below market rates. This will allow us to move forward with our expansion plans for additional developers and several new functions.

Fernando has led the project with August Talent Ventures (the HR firm). They have provided us with initial salary recommendations for all full-time staff. There is further refinement yet to take place directly with each manager to finalize salaries, but the funding requested should approximate the final values closely.

Note that at this time, we are not funding any benefits. Typical benefits and their costs vary widely by country, so it will take a couple of additional months to determine what benefits are appropriate, and the best means to acquire those benefits on behalf of network
employees. The team expansion proposal will contain a proposed Director of HR, who would be tasked with assessing options for providing benefits, either directly, or more likely through a third-party.

Why one comprehensive proposal for the existing team?

For the April budget cycle, the most important questions we're posing to the network are effectively "Should market rate pay be established?" and "If so, should the team be expanded?". In the past, we broke out funding proposals for each team (DashCore Developers, Evo Developers, etc), but that structure would have done a poor job of isolating the above two questions.

Core team salary proposals have been highly supported by the network. In fact, in last month's budget, the least-supported of these proposals received 989 "yes" votes to only 20 "no" votes. Continuing to break out individual budgets is time-consuming, costs additional resources (proposal costs), and seems to add little value given the current level of support for these expenses. If in the future more than 10% of the votes cast for core team salary are "no", I can solicit feedback on what the network would like separately voted upon,
and attempt to provide the requested additional granularity in future budget cycles.

What specific roles are supported by this proposal?

14 full-time roles:
- Director of Business Development (Daniel)
- Director of Finance (Ryan)
- Evolution Team Lead (Andy)
- Evolution Backend Development Lead (Jon)
- DashCore Developers (Timothy, Chaeplin, UdjinM6)
- Evolution Developers (Vitaly, Nathan, prtfw, Alex)
- Head of Infrastructure (moocowmoo)
- QA, Automation, Testing Lead (Holger)
- Marketing & International Outreach Lead (Philipp)

18 part-time roles:
- 2 part-time project managers (Robert, Balu)
- Network operations (Jeff)
- China managers (Alexy, Raico)
- On-staff translators (Junior, Leonidas, daf, Silvio)
- Business development associate (Matt)
- Administrative / Legal (Fernando)
- Writer / Editor (David)
- Testing / Deployment (Alexandre)
- DashCore Developer (crowning)
- Evolution Developers (0xfff, acidburn, Thomazs, Chuck)

What is the total cost?

Based on the preliminary assessment by ATV, the ongoing run-rate for the salaries for all 32 roles is $123,842 / month. However, because of the savings already set aside for core-team salaries, and the rapid price appreciation experienced over the last two months, we will be relying on savings for a significant portion of the April expense.

What if the price of Dash drops in the future?

Should the price of Dash drop and the core team could no longer fund its other expenses while reserving 20% of the budget for the community, we would reduce our requested funding and effectively take a pay cut to stay within budget. Such a scenario would require a substantial decline in Dash's value.

If you have any additional questions, please post them in the Dash Forum and tag @babygiraffe in your message to ensure I see your post.

Requested funding is as follows for the April 5th budget cycle:
Total: 397.06 Dash

Note: Should any funding remain, we will apply it toward future core team salary expenses.

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Discussion: Should we fund this proposal?

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-1 point,7 years ago
I continue to ask, why are these budgets denominated in Dash? It is obvious Dash is in a bull market. Denominating budget proposals in Dash makes budget proposals seem very dishonest and wasteful with the budget. Denominate them in USD till Dash becomes a stable currency.

By the time this budget gets approved, the amount of USD this budget will provide will most likely be double than what the proposer asked for.

At the time of this writing, each Dash is currently $67.35. Date is April 1, 2017.

397 Dash = $26,373 USD in today's price.

Accounting 101 my friends.
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1 point,7 years ago
I'm so glad we can finally pay real salaries. Congratulations boys, and thanks!
Reply
4 points,7 years ago
Thank @babgiraffe for the very detailed review of where the DASH would be going. I always love to fund humans rather than numbers.

A big thanks to all of the Core team! Without you none of this would be possible.
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2 points,7 years ago
Thanks for the transparency on funds, keep up the amazing work!

Growing every day.
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1 point,7 years ago
What happens if we vote no, will they really just down tools and leave?
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0 points,7 years ago
They will be bought by Blockstream and AXA bank. And will put 10 kilobyte blocks in place :)
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0 points,7 years ago
Probably not completely. Many of us were working on the project for free before there was a budget. But most people who have left their jobs to focus on Dash would need to find a new job and would put less time into Dash. Development would be much slower, we'd lose team members and reduce our capacity to attract new ones.

In a less extreme scenario, if "no" votes are more than 10% of the votes in the proposal, next month it will be broken down into smaller ones so voters can be more clear about what they like and what they don't.
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0 points,7 years ago
It would be more like: Did they really just down tools and leave? Vote no then.
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0 points,7 years ago
Maybe they have a very special spork for that :P
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