I am writing this post to inform you of a request I made to my team members in the Ops subDAO for retroactive compensation for the additional duties I took on this year from June to August. While this request has been approved by my fellow trustees @chris@chaoslabs and our Enforcer @Immutablelawyer, I wanted to additionally notify the community for transparency purposes in case there were any questions, concerns or feedback.
One of the four primary responsibilities of the Ops subDAOâs v2 mandate was ârecruiting an Operations Lead, a Technical Project Lead, and a Site Reliability Engineer to scale the Ops subDAO and to provide technical support to prepare the dYdX DAO for the future.â I was directly responsible for this hiring work, and my efforts included promoting the job openings, designing the multi-stage interview process for each role, selecting candidates and conducting and coordinating their interviews with myself and other trustees, contributors and stakeholders, procuring an external recruiting firm, developing assessment criteria and internal documentation, as well as onboarding our amazing contributors @valentin@dimitar and Piotr! (See also our September update).
Because this active recruiting work falls outside the scope of typical Trustee duties of providing oversight on Ops subDAO decision making, participating in legal workstreams and providing occasional operational support, for which I am ordinarily compensated at 2000 USDC per month, I have requested a one-time retroactive compensation for this work across June-August of 6000 USDC total.
As mentioned, while this request has been approved internally, I would like to invite feedback, comments and questions from the community before we proceed. If there are no objections, this retroactive compensation would be paid out this time next week, on December 6.
I am not disputing the amount of effort you have put in. And you might well deserve this retroactive compensation. The scope of tasks was clearly outlined in the initial proposal, which has been fulfilled. How tasks were allocated amongst trustees is beyond the communityâs concern. The main issue here is the low salaries.
The procedure of these retroactive payments itself is not to my liking; we should be paying adequate salaries upfront that would cover the entire scope of work. We wrote about this before the extension of the Ops DAO. If I recall correctly, @Immutablelawyer requested a salary increase, which was denied, and instead a $3K retro payment was made. Now @Immutablelawyerâs involvement has been reduced to a minimum, and it seems to me that we have effectively lost an excellent contributor. You have now requested an amount that is twice as much â why not the same amount?
It seems to me that it would be a good idea to increase salaries and for retroactive bonuses to conduct some sort of voting.
The practice of retroactive bonuses is fundamentally malicious. The community voted for a specific budget for 18 months. Whatâs to stop any sub-DAO member from setting themselves a $100K bonus and voting for it within their sub-DAO?
Now that we have lost two trustees, it is my opinion that there is not a sufficient quorum to make any decisions regarding budget modifications
In short, my questions are solely regarding the procedure itself, not specifically about Joannaâs compensation for her work.
To build off of @Joanna7459 's post, the sum requested was indeed approved by Trustees & Myself as an Enforcer of DOT.
To add a bit of further context to Joannaâs post, the role of a Trustee is part-time in nature. However, for a few months before we set the initial infrastructure (such as the dedicated pages for documentation, hiring @valentin etc.), Joanna was almost single-handedly taking care of all the operational work-flow at DOT in a quasi-fulltime manner due to the substantial increase in hours she contributed at the time to get the initial infrastructure (from a personnel & operations point of view), in place. Hence, these retroactive payments are an âanomalyâ of sorts due to there being the need for a substantial amount of hours which rendered her role quasi-fulltime from June-August (Joanna was even handling comms w/myself, scheduling all meetings etc.).
Hence, I find her request to be justified due to the above.
In addition, to @RealVovochka 's point @valentin has since discussed ways and means of establishing a framework for retroactive payments so these anomalies can be avoided in the future (hence, good point re. the procedure - we are in the process of establishing one - it has been delayed a bit due to the workload from a dYdX Chain perspective).
Thank you @Joanna7459 for all the hard work, you have and continue to put in, without you I wouldnât have been able to hit the ground running as I did! Even though my vote doesnât count in this matter, you still have it.
Thanks for the perspective. I was concerned thinking that these retroactive compensations might arise in the future, when ideally it could be handled with an appropriate framework and process.
Thank you for your work and glad to know you were compensated for it.