I will try my best to make that change. This forum doesn’t like me very much
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Proposal numbers
I just ran some numbers to roughly demonstrate the relationship between the salaries and the amount of work done by contributors in the last term.
According to the PIP system in Notion, created by the proposal leader, the largest amount of reported work in quantity and density was done by: myself, TheSmith, and Firebomb. (Atlan has a special place for his deliverables in #design-tasks on Notion)
When the leader Hpayne was asked twice about the huge gap (2x, 3x, sometimes 4x) between some contributors and others, the answers were:
- The rent in US is more expensive
- American contributors run a bigger ‘legal risk’ than other nationalities in ShapeShift DAO
This seems like an unnecessary expense to have, given that the DAO is global, especially for micromanaging.
Considering the salary impact of the Leader, justified by micromanaging and living in the US, and the lack of [reported value x salary raise] logic in Twells’ new salary, it seems unfair… is “unfair” the right word here?
The same contributors being overseen by this management are the ones taking more FOX in their payment. The amount of USD expected by this proposal seems to accelerate the DAO’s runway depletion, and highly compensated contributors seem not to care as much as the team players being overseen during these cycles.
I don’t believe the choices made by the leadership this term have set the team and the DAO up for success.
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RareEvo was a poor choice of event and investment. Not just the event, but the whole OOH operation (16k) and structural expense (even though I had lowered the costs from 14k to 6k) does not promise any return. It’s a Cardano event almost no one in the DAO wants to attend (unlike ETH Denver, DevCon, and others), but don’t worry - Hpayne’s girlfriend and two non-crypto friends will be there to help.
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The timing of Farcaster Boom and Base blockchain launching was overlooked and not well managed, despite my efforts to encourage those activities. We seem to be constantly two steps behind the market.
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The AI operation that was proposed became an infinite re-iteration cycle that has so far wasted contributors’ time and had no clear effect.
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There has been no substantial social network growth (apart from Thorchain campaigns and again X spaces).
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Long-form posts are low quality and have the same outreach as Web1. Mirror, Medium, and the blog section are dead, apart from the landing page TheSmith is working on.
The biggest wins of this term were delivered by the Design Team, Translations and Product, X spaces (which was culturally pushed by globalization), Landing Pages and SEO, and the Optimism grant (the Thorchain grant was a JpThor-accelerated lucky opportunity that came from my X DMs directly to the failed OOH plan).
This is the actual AI Summary of each contributor’s workload:
Detailed Contributions Comparison:
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Twells:
- Contributions: 17
- External Meetings Attended: 0
- Contribution Density: 5.82%
- Meeting Density: 0%
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Hpayne: (Hpayne does not report so not on his neck on that data, but would be cool if all the contributors had to report)
- Contributions: 1
- External Meetings Attended: 0
- Contribution Density: 0.34%
- Meeting Density: 0%
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NFTHINKER: ( new guy, in 1 month reported almost the same work load as twells)
- Contributions: 13
- External Meetings Attended: 0
- Contribution Density: 4.45%
- Meeting Density: 0%
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TheSmith:
- Contributions: 55
- External Meetings Attended: 1
- Contribution Density: 18.84%
- Meeting Density: 16.67%
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Atlan Coelho: (reports in a different place, and kind of designs for the entire dao alone, so …)
- Contributions: 2
- External Meetings Attended: 0
- Contribution Density: 0.68%
- Meeting Density: 0%
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Firebomb: (best the dao has, prove me wrong)
- Contributions: 54
- External Meetings Attended: 0
- Contribution Density: 18.49%
- Meeting Density: 0%
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Vlad:
- Contributions: 58
- External Meetings Attended: 5
- Contribution Density: 19.86%
- Meeting Density: 83.33%
The table displays the volume and density of contributions and meetings attended by each contributor. This comparison highlights that Vlad has the highest number of contributions and meetings attended, followed by TheSmith and Firebomb.
Proposed Solution:
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Learn from the Globalization Workstream, where the leaders, myself included, reduced their already lower-than-average salaries to maintain a larger workforce. The same workforce that made last year’s Marketing workstream survive and deliver something when the whole “department” was Hpayne and Twells making tweets and the DAO had no creative force apart from us. If you want to bring new costs, reduce your own; the runway is close and might bite you.
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Stop the fear culture. Hpayne made everyone think that he holds the keys to everyone’s jobs because of some kind of internal relationship with other workstream leaders and contributors. This is not how a DAO operates.
I am putting up a counter-proposal with a substantial decrease in USDC cost, keeping only the core contributors to maintain the wins from the past term, with no IRL event operations, only key contributors’ presence at most (no sponsorships), and with the main focus on grant hunting. We can finally get grants because our product has never been better, the runway has never been closer, and we have passionate contributors who will be here until the treasury is negative, which seems not to be the case for contributors who would rather see the DAO die than reduce their salaries or increase their FOX take.
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Looking forward to reading your proposal.
I don’t know what the heck all of this is saying; the data is really unclear on what a contribution is…?
Either way, it’s a really bad look to have on the public record for your future prospects Vlad without anything substantial. I’d recommend reading this again and if it’s actually representative of anything real or just venting.
It’s definitely hard to be back in the job market you absolutely have my sympathies but a PIP is designed to let people turn things around or be let go.
There isn’t much to understand about the data. It’s Notion files interpreted by AI, which was prompted to measure contributions (reported task density) and identify types of contributions (for example, meetings). It supports my point that the wage distribution is unbalanced, using the PIP as the chosen source of truth for workstream contributors.
If you think reports on Notion and AI are good tools, you can trust what you read.
Thank you for your sympathies and advice, but I believe any place I would work would appreciate my courage and passion. If not, I wouldn’t want to work there. I have 3 points:
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The DAO treasury can no longer sustain the highest salaries, which continue to drain USDC as if there’s no tomorrow. Rather than workstream leaders decreasing their own salaries, medium and small wage contributors have been repeatedly forced to either reduce their salaries or be fired. The justifications for inequality are always as ridiculous as: “I am American, I pay a lot for rent; the DAO needs to provide, I am at legal risk for being a leader and American.”
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There is no justification for doubling a contributor’s salary who hasn’t reported as much work as others, while letting others (like me, Guiriba, or Joana) go.
DAO politics and this “please to pass” culture of our DAO rarely give us opportunities to try something new or evaluate competing solutions for the same problem. This relates to the difficulty we have rotating leaders as well (don’t give me eng. leader as a counter-example). Everyone knows that leaders accumulate power and relationships that make it very difficult to challenge, even before the voting phase. -
@Hpayne, I want to use this reply opportunity to announce that I’m not moving forward with my counterproposal, not now. I’ve been working for/with ShapeShift for years, passed through many wonderful and tiring moments, and during this time I grew and learned with this team you now lead. Not all contributors are comfortable with either of the proposals, especially the counterproposal situation. They’re understandably afraid of voicing their thoughts (which proves my 3rd point), and I’ll respect that. I also understand how either winning or losing this would cause long-lasting complications in their relationships with other current workstream leaders if it passed. But I also don’t accept your narrative. I’ve been doing awesome Vlad wizardry on this DAO for years, and if your crazy ideas like RareEvo didn’t return what you expected, it’s not my fault. I rock, and FOX knows it.
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For curious eyes, this is the counterproposal I was drafting: Abstract/Summary - HackMD
It proposes to continue the work initiated by core contributors and introduces a partnership with a reputable web3 marketing agency. When we started the DAO, such agencies were either unavailable or unreliable, but the landscape has improved. We’ve secured two excellent options from well-known DAO contributors, priced at $4,000 and $6,000. These agencies will provide comprehensive support to our native DAO contributors, significantly enhancing our capabilities and potential. An entire team’s support in one line of budget, and as mentioned in the first comment:
substantial decrease in USDC cost, keeping only core contributors to maintain wins from the past term, with no IRL event operations, only key contributors’ presence at most (no sponsorships), and with the main focus on grant hunting.
As mentioned, I’m not moving forward with the proposal now. Maybe I’ll have a better draft in 6 months, maybe the MKTBD workstream finds a good path too, maybe the DAO finds success in the meantime (which I really, really wish, in financial and decentralization terms) and so do its members. I think the DAO deserves better than what it is right now, and better than what I can do with this rush. So I can only wish the workstream good luck and wiser decisions if it passes.
And Tim, I know I don’t have a fancy, prolific way of writing like you, but I’ve got some meme skills. If Notion+GPT wasn’t clear for you, I think this meme might help with understanding. Notice that the meme is about the MKT workstream, but could be applied to other workstreams. It’s hard to imagine because we have between 2-5 people per department now, but they would be on the right side if they were still around, and the leaders on the left side. Remember, Globalization workstream had 8 people and cost the salary of 1 workstream leader.
This image represents the global contributors a.k.a. smaller wages, having to accept reduced salaries reduced or get fired because of the decreasing runway, in order to keep the American leaders’ lifestyle while the less paid contributors do most of the work.
These are my thoughts. Sorry if they were offensive or not polished. I think it’s important to voice them, and I had voiced them to Hpayne during an entire week before the proposal where we merged Globalization and MKT. Now I’m voicing it more publicly.
I’m taking 2 weeks of vacation like Hpayne and Twells did during the term, because I didn’t. I’ll see you guys when I come back, in the Discord server, as a member and holder.
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