I’m all for this and happy to even pay those salaries, but I hate the process by which this was done, so I voted No.
100% agree the team needs to be comped very well. There is a lot of competition in this space and we need to attract the best talent.
But let’s make sure we use a proper framework and process for all BIPs!
I’m definitely for resolving compensation and attracting the best talent. The figures quoted here some too high though and would recommend they are reviewed against market rate - certainly we want to pay the high end to attract talent but a rough calculation suggests this works out at $1m a year (ish) each?
I would also suggest the partnership manager role is not a junior role. Strategic partnerships are obviously very important in crypto so the role should be at a higher level.
Folks, as announced on the Discord, we’re removing the snapshot to allow for additional discussions.
@thRoberto20 @cryptomooniac @bajja @Reem appreciate you voicing your concerns.
BIP was rolled back for further feedback and community discussion, everyone relax and post your thoughts below.
I agree Badger devs should be incentivised and a correct renumeration should be provided to those commiting their time and effort to it. However…
~$1mil/year on average is a little exaggerated. Even by most top tech-company salaries, this is quite on the high side. Can we not go towards a yearly “salary”, and rebase the amount of Badger every month to fit the yearly salary?
Thank you. This speaks highly of you and the team. I appreciate a lot you listening to our concerns.
I just think it is important to have a healthy governance process. That’s all.
I was surprised to see that a snapshot had started … so soon? not letting the community argue? I have changed my opinion as a result of this, let’s remember that we are flooded with “SOON” of things that accumulate and basic errors that have been dragging on for a long time, it is understood that the money you are going to receive is equivalent to the work that you will get ahead if no, for what?
Another idea, since the price of BADGER is volatile;
What about going with the number of BADGER that would be equivalent to a fixed salary in $ at a certain point of time, like beginning of every month?
Ex:
Let’s assume that the salary is 100k.
If BADGER is $100 in March, then that salary will be 1000 BADGER.
If BADGER decreases to $50 in April, then the salary will be 2000 BADGER.
If BADGER increases to $200 in May, then the salary will be 500 BADGER.
and so on…
Great! Alright, I think a good starting point for this discussion are the following two points:
What is a fair salary for a crypto developer/contributor for a project that has over 2 billion TVL?
What do the contributor’s want to be paid in? Do they want 50/50 stablecoin-BADGER or do they want something else? Could do Claws, DIGG, BTC, ETH, and a varying ratio. The 50/50 has a high level of risk/reward.
In principle I agree to this framework and the amounts that are being considered. The team has done an amazing job.
However, I don’t agree that both stable + Badger should be part of the salary and paid daily. I think the community and the project itself would be better served if the following could be considered:
Base compensation (salary) will be paid in stablecoins (USDC) from the amount allocated. No issues if it is paid daily through the Badger tree.
The amount of Badger allocated in this BIP should be used as a long-term incentives (bonus payments subject to performance) and as such, it should have a vesting period with partial unlocks. This to avoid dumps and to better align interests. Same way stock grants or stock options work.
I think @Spadaboom and the team should suggest what the vesting/unlock periods should be.
I lean towards this option. It gives the security of USDC salary while still providing incentive to improve the platform. I don’t have a problem with the amounts proposed, just prefer either time or performance based vesting.
I want to expand on this and provide some numbers:
Senior Backend Engineer
Let’s say for the month of January, the compensation would look like the following:
Jan Week 1: $3.4K USDC + $1.7K in BADGER (242 tokens @ ~$7/$BADGER)
Jan Week 2: $3.4K USDC + $1.7K in BADGER (170 tokens @ ~$10/$BADGER)
Jan Week 3: $3.4K USDC + $1.7K in BADGER (141 tokens @ ~$12/$BADGER)
Jan Week 4: $3.4K USDC + $1.7K in BADGER (70 tokens @ ~$24/$BADGER)
The BADGERS that are paid out are backdated according to the average price of that week. Up for discussion include the specifics on the lock up period, and the matching bonus badger amount (for example should it be +50% or +80%, etc)
I can share some of my personal insight into how compensation is structured at various tech firms - having worked at various start ups and large tech companies.
For top tech companies, compensation for senior developers is fairly competitive. My Uber offer as a senior dev was around 600k TC (total compensation) - this grew over time as the company’s valuation grew. The stock component was roughly 2/3rds of TC. Stock is usually given out based on the company’s current valuation at the time you sign your contract and vests over 4 years. This type of compensation is readily available on sites such as https://www.levels.fyi/.
For small startups, the total TC is usually less than what you would get at a top tech company and generally consists of more stock (could be up to 90% of your TC). The price of the stock you are given is pegged to the price of the company’s shares at the time you join. Therefore, you are exposed to much greater upside (and also downside as many startups fail). As a result, most of the startup shares I own are worthless while a small number of shares are extremely valuable. It is not uncommon for initial startup shares to be worth exponentially more as the company grows. For example, Ryan Graves is the first employee at Uber and his NW is $1.6 billion.
I have less personal insight into how compensation is structured in the crypto space so am only able to use yearn’s funding proposal as reference point. In yearn’s proposal (YIP-57: Funding Yearn's Future - Protocol and Governance - yearn.finance), they minted 6666 YFI and allocated 1/3 (2222 YFI) to retain “key contributors”. This is roughly $72 million dollars in value.
Thank you for the insight. Regarding YIP-57, those tokens are vested.
I am in full support of the amounts to be granted both in USDC and in Badger and I have absolutely no issue if the each member of the team ends up receiving several million USD worth. They would deserve that and even more for what they are building.
I just think that the Badger allocations should be strategic and paid to them as incentives (which will allow Bader to retain those key contributors), with vesting. And I am even leaving up to them to propose how this vesting / unlocking mechanism should be.
What I don’t agree is to distribute the Badger daily through the Badger tree without any vesting, because then it is just part of the salary, it is not used strategically as an incentive.
Agreed. Distributing it daily doesn’t seem to make much sense given our recent BIP to reduce emissions of badger.
I’m glad you brought up Yearn as an example here.
I think our community should be cautious about nickel and diming this proposal. Yearn suffered from this for a long time and my belief is that the impact really set them back. The amount of time the core team over there had to spend on simply trying to respond to the plethora of salary related conversations, was time that they could have spent building.
I don’t think that the current proposal for Badger’s ops/devs is outlandish.
At all.
I fully agree that we should not nickel and dim the proposal, and I fully agree that it is not outlandish at all. That is not and shouldn’t be the point.
On the contrary, we want the team be fully incentivized, and we want to keep them (retain their talent). This is why I believe that the Badger portion should be used and allocated more strategically - so incentives are better aligned.
I think it makes sense to have some sort of vesting schedule. This is consistent w/ industry practices. The crypto cycle is compressed so this would reduce the 4 year vesting cycle → 1 year. Normally vesting of stock is monthly - would monthly vesting over the course of 1 year make sense?
Also, in terms of applying some kind of performance based vesting schedule - in most startups the employee would just get let go if they were underperforming and I believe that is the case here as well.
At larger companies, they put you onto a PIP (performance improvement plan) and give you a ton of time to improve but I don’t think that’s necessary or makes sense in this context.