Price controls have a temporary positive impact for the consumer on the demand side, then they break the market.
Neverwas - what is the intent of this proposal?
“Price controls have a temporary positive impact for the consumer on the demand side, then they break the market.”
As to what I have stated in a reply to JoshuAF –
“As to this proposal discussion, while it can be a temporary solution to put a cap on salaries, in a particular set of circumstances or time of need, this would need to be a temporary solution as deemed relevant and I believe larger conversations need to be had in the community moving forward.”
As to breaking markets, that is a very generic and blanketed statement. I would say that the situation and the implementation of any such measures can and have varying and both intending/unintended results. This comes from rapid and constant change including a-lot of unknowns, variables and predictive models. They can also be used on the supply side of economics as well, but as stated I wasn’t debating free market economics. You challenged (anyone?) to show an example, simple as that I did so, multiple in fact. I also addressed other things in your post but no worries continue claiming something that I never said.
“Neverwas - what is the intent of this proposal?”
This isn’t my proposal so I wouldn’t be able to speak to that. If you do not believe that, I don’t have much else that I can say. I have never had to hide my posts, or fear what I have stated here or on discord. If the concern is because I am replying to others here and adding perspective, please by all means encourage others, and in doing so different perspective. I personally find it relatively useless and boring when people parrot each other verse challenge one another but that is me.
Would it be nice if the original poster of this thread was comfortable in continuing the conversation, sure and maybe they are and just haven’t seen the need at this point. I have no idea, and really it doesn’t matter to me. It should matter to the community and what it represents, but another conversation.
I haven’t yet weighed in on this post because this is complicated; there are a lot of non-explicit ramifications of a decision like this, and I wanted to make sure I did at least a reasonable job of trying to consider them all before contributing my $0.02.
As much as I want to argue that capping workstream leader salaries would be against the best interests of the DAO, I’m having significant difficulty making an honest argument against it. I’ll start by addressing what’s directly written in the proposal, then get into some of the implied results that I see.
The primary benefits mentioned are related to overall cost reduction and spending efficiency. This brings up a topic of discussion that I hadn’t previously considered – what actually is the value of the administrative, managerial, and representative responsibility that differentiates a workstream leader from an independent contributor? Also, why should this be associated with technical seniority at all? A competent workstream leader obviously needs to have some domain-specific knowledge to operate a team effectively, but the set of responsibilities between a senior technical contributor and a manager/budget administrator can otherwise be cleanly separated in my opinion. There have been several comments made about the disastrous consequences of price fixing in planned economies and departure from the free labor market potentially driving talent away from the DAO, but consider that this is a burgeoning industry; there really is no sizable labor market for “workstream leaders”, “subDAO facilitators”, or the like - at least not as we have defined the role here. Because of this, the compensation details are necessarily arbitrary, with not enough exposure to free market dynamics to properly price the value of the labor. The labor is priced through continual negotiations between service providers and service consumers, and those have largely not yet taken place.
What is more interesting to me about this proposal though is the implied results:
With a method different from any of those that I proposed several months ago, this proposal actually does solve a lot of the problems that I see with the stark imbalance of authority/autonomy to accountability for workstream leaders under the provisions of SCP-92. That proposal granted workstream leaders sweeping authority (with no stated fiduciary obligation to the DAO) checked by only symbolic accountability through what I consider to be a highly ineffective mechanism. Removing a workstream leader is very difficult to do in practice. The DAO has to weigh the grievance toward the individual against the harm done to the organization in choosing to endure lost output in the ramp-down/ramp-up time between workstream leaders. This creates a situation where, the more important the output of the workstream to the overall success of the DAO, the more lenient the DAO will tend to be toward the leader of that workstream, and even more so when during difficult financial times when we must operate as efficiently as possible. This is exactly the opposite of a functioning system of checks and balances.
With a number of peripheral benefits afforded to workstream leaders by the position (comparably high salaries, functional autonomy, etc.), no fiduciary obligation to the DAO in place, and only a very weak system that can be used to regulate questionable actions on the part of the workstream leader, how can the other members of the DAO be certain that workstream leaders have chosen to occupy leadership positions out of a desire to honor the best interests of the DAO and not to instead honor their own best interests at the expense of the DAO?
Don’t trust. Verify.
This removes the primary peripheral benefit of being a workstream leader. Furthermore, if it is true that talented individuals could expect to easily take a position with higher cash compensation somewhere else, then any competent individual occupying a workstream leader at the DAO would be demonstrating their motivations and opinions about the future success of the organization by choosing to act against their own short-term best interests in favor of aligning their own long term best interests with those of the DAO. These would be individuals who are willing to defer short-term personal gains under the belief that their contributions will pay dividends when the DAO’s success is realized at a later date. This is very much the kind of person that you want in a leadership role.
Many of the arguments made against a salary cap for workstream leaders seem to be predicated on the assumption that workstream leaders possess disproportionate amounts of domain-specific talent. Assuming for the sake of argument that this is the case, then what sense does it make to burden the most technically competent of the available contributors with substantial non-technical obligations? Technically competent contributors stand to deliver the most value to the DAO by spending as much of their time as is available performing technical tasks.
@Apotheosis - “We need to pay people for the value that they bring to the DAO - the amount is irrelevant. For example, if someone is adding $300,000 of value to the DAO, we should have no issue paying them $250,000. Indeed, we’d want to hire as many of those individuals as possible.”
Fair point, but can you make a quantitative argument for the value that any workstream leader position brings to the DAO?
Fundamentally, the product is only a tool to deliver value to customers. Customers demonstrate their perceived value of the tool through usage patterns and purchasing decisions. You would expect then that as more value is delivered, customers would use the product frequently, and in a paid product model, the price that customers are willing to pay for the product would increase. All of the internal process maintenance, team management strategies, workflow tooling, software design best practices, etc. are only optimizations to assist us in making better use of the tool. If we are not delivering value to customers with the product, then these optimizations are useless – actually worse than useless, because it costs the organization money to maintain them.
Right now, we have a low user count in comparison to our competitors and virtually zero revenue. This implies then that our product is not delivering as much value as we would like to customers. What sense does it make then to allocate a significant portion of our largest spend category to focusing on the optimizations? By this, I mean what sense does it make to have the workstream leaders, presumed to be the most competent in their areas of expertise, focusing on tasks other than those directly relevant to their primary skill set? To deliver the most value to the DAO, they should be focusing directly on improving the product, not product delivery optimizations.
On the most recent governance call, @Neverwas made a point about some subset of contributors having conflated team leadership (an administrative and managerial role) with organizational leadership (a board-level or executive role) at the DAO. That is spot-on, and I could not have said it better myself. While I think that many of the current workstream leaders are absolutely qualified to manage the daily operations of their teams, I personally could not support electing any of the current set of workstream leaders to an executive leadership role (other than perhaps @seven7hwave .) That certainly is not to be taken as a disparaging comment to anyone in any way - which of them has any previous C-level experience at a comparable organization or a proven track record of success in staking it out on one’s own in this industry? Would any of the current workstream leaders expect to be taken on at a major organization in an executive or VP role from here? I don’t think so, and that has nothing at all to do with technical competence or ability. The skill set required for competent organizational leadership is entirely different than the skillset required to be a competent technical practitioner in the same way that being a good engineer says nothing whatsoever about whether or not that engineer would make an even halfway decent manager.
@TylerShapeShift pointed out during this week’s governance call that the proposed salary cap might preclude all but those with the financial means to comfortably forego a competitive salary (or those who are willing to endure the discomfort) from occupying workstream leader roles at the DAO. I certainly understand how that sounds undesirable. At the same time, given the specific context of this organization, I think there are some compelling arguments as to why that might be desirable.
- Given that workstream leaders’ roles and responsibilities have been conflated (at least to some degree) with positions of organizational leadership, for a workstream leader whose livelihood was dependent on the outcome of decisions made at the DAO, could you be certain that those individuals were at all times acting in the best interest of the DAO? Given the natural tendencies of ordinary people, could you reasonably expect someone with immediate financial obligations to consistently make decisions against their own financial best interest and act instead in the financial best interest of the DAO?
- Tyler also mentioned that certain individuals might have the luxury of not having to pursue a competitive salary as a result of having been involved in this industry for a long period of time and being now able to enjoy the benefits of their early investments in crypto. For an organizational leadership role, shouldn’t you prefer individuals who have been around the industry for the greatest amount of time? What speaks more strongly to the quality of decision-making and foresight on the part of those individuals than independent financial success as a result? It seems to me that that segment of the population here may likely be the most qualified for any organizational leadership role at the DAO and that the results of their efforts demonstrate this.
I think it should be reiterated that, as far as I can tell by what is written in the post, this proposal would not reduce the salaries of contributors across the board, and does not prevent current workstream leaders from taking positions with competitive salaries as individual contributors. One thing that is interesting to me in the responses from workstream leaders here on this week’s call is what appears to me as a very strong reluctance to do that. Why?
A strong reluctance to take an independent contributor role with all other things being equal means that there must be some other motivating factor, and there are many possibilities as to what that might be:
Do the workstream leaders recognize that there is in fact a benefit afforded to the leadership designation in the ability to act independently?
- If the DAO is operating meritocratically, governed by the successes of compelling arguments in a free exchange of ideas, then the ability of any individual to see their own quality ideas put into practice should not change with the designation. If we are choosing to employ strategies by any other process, then we are necessarily acting on suboptimal strategies.
Is there some perception of status associated with the workstream leader positions?
- I’d argue that this is a mistake. Everyone at the DAO has a separate set of responsibilities, and the entire organization suffers when any of us drop the ball. This perspective establishes and maintains an interaction between contributors that is governed by mutual respect and mutual motivation to fulfill the expectations of one’s team members.
Do the workstream leaders feel that it would be more difficult to justify the same salary as an individual contributor? If this is the case, then considering that workstream leaders are presumed to be qualified for the leadership designations by demonstrations of superior technical competence in their particular domain of responsibility, then this implies that the value of the workstream leadership positions has in fact been overpriced
- . If what qualifies you for the position is being really good at thing X, and the position requires you to spend much of your time doing things that are not thing X and do not require any particular specialization, does it not stand to reason that you should be able to deliver more value to the organization by spending all of your time doing thing X instead?
It’s also possible that there is some degree of the “if I’m not in charge, then I don’t want to be here” mentality. This is common, and I do understand it. However, I would argue that, for anyone of that point of view, if a non-leadership position is not an option, then leaving is the best thing to do both for the individual and for the rest of the organization. I don’t believe that there is any personal glory to be achieved here. To the success of the DAO, it doesn’t matter whose ideas are put to action – it matters that the best ideas are put to action, regardless of origin. It has been said that those who want power are the ones who least deserve it – I am strongly of the opinion that this is generally correct, and over the course of my (limited) experience,
- I have found this to be true, without exception, in every domain.
I think that some clarifications and perhaps small modifications of the details of this proposal are necessary to make it actionable, but I have reversed my initial position on this proposal after further consideration of its effects.
I plan to vote in favor of this.
To me, i see this is odd. you have someone doing the job of a contributor, and then you are adding on extra responsiblities, and mostly stress. for a small amount of extra. like a manager at a gas station getting $.50 extra an hour, that now has to show up , no matter what. So lets punish (more) the person that is doing the same job, plus more.
This post, i think also stated that that leader couldnt take any other position in the DAO. (means tyler cant take over 2 positions again?)
This post doesnt ‘directly’ affect me… but i think it directly affects our chances negatively.
Maybe if we change the title of the ‘Head of the workstream’
and instead of Leadership channel, its Head Room.
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This proposal is kinda sus from my perspective. It feels like there’s an implication that management isn’t worth what they’re being paid, which is a debate as old as organizational hierarchies themselves. If that’s the case, maybe there should be a proposal about implementing some tangible, measurable success criteria for management instead?
Anyway, in a world where most of the money in most organizations ends up in the pockets of the executive and upper administrative tiers, and CEO pay traditionally outpaces everyone else’s by multiple orders of magnitude, I think it’s noble to consider setting some boundaries. This proposal would be more palatable to me if it suggested caps that were a percentage of the highest salary paid out in the workstream or something to that effect, rather than an unwavering arbitrary number like $120,000.
I think this proposal makes it clear that the DAO will not accept that its contributors are fired just so that leaders earn a higher salary.
my vote is yes
Voting AGAINST this proposal is in favor of abusive salary increases and unfair dismissals
I vote is YES
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This sounds like a much better approach in my opinion if this were to move forward in some way. But as it is, I am against this proposal.