Proposal “DCG-Comp-Dec-Feb“ (Completed)Back

Title:DCG Compensation Dec 2021 - Feb 2022
Owner:glennaustin
Monthly amount: 2324 DASH (89008 USD)
Completed payments: 3 totaling in 6972 DASH (0 month remaining)
Payment start/end: 2021-11-11 / 2022-02-09 (added on 2021-11-06)
Votes: 844 Yes / 115 No / 8 Abstain

Proposal description

Dash Core Group November 26th Funding Proposals
DCG is submitting 3 funding proposals for the budget cycle that pays out November 26th:
1) DCG Compensation: 2,324 Dash per month (currently in month 1/3)
2) DCG Business Development: 321 Dash (currently in month 1/3)
3) DCG Marketing: 321 Dash (currently in month 1/3)

What does this specific proposal fund?
This proposal funds Dash Core Group's ongoing compensation costs - including all developers, administrative, business development, marketing and support staff.  This is a multi-month proposal that will cover compensation for December through February.  

As of November 5th, 2021, DCG has 44 paid staff associated with the project. In addition, we have 2 volunteers who have decided to work for no compensation. Out of the 44 paid staff, 1 has volunteered to reduce their salary while we rebuild our reserves to 1 year levels. So in total we have 3 volunteers who are working for reduced or no compensation.

For more details about DCG’s team please follow this link: https://www.dash.org/dcg/. We have been aggressively hiring in the past few months with 20 staff joining in the last 6 months. The roles were as follows:

Technology Organization:
  • Android Software Engineer
  • Android Software Engineer
  • Android Software Engineer
  • C++ Software Engineer
  • Senior C++ Software Engineer
  • Senior C++ Software Engineer
  • Cryptographer
  • Go Software Engineer (platform team)
  • Go Software Engineer (platform team)
  • Go Software Engineer (platform team)
  • iOS Software Engineer
  • JS Software Engineer (platform team)
  • Research and Development Engineer
  • Rust Software Engineer (platform team)

Technology Support
  • Infrastructure Engineer
  • Product Owner (platform team)
  • UX/UI Designer

Admin / Business Development / Marketing
  • Business Development Manager
  • Content Manager
  • HR Specialist (part time)

In addition, another three staff have accepted written offers and will start in the coming weeks.  The roles are as follows:
  • Senior SM / Agile Coach
  • Rust Software Engineer (platform team)
  • Research and Development Engineer

Finally, we plan to continue hiring going forward and plan on filling another three positions in the next few months (https://www.dash.org/dcg/jobs/). We anticipate DCG expanding to include approximately 50 staff by the end of the year.

The current headcount and salary breakdown between Development, Development Support and Admin/Finance/Business Development/Marketing is as follows:
Development (those who code): 26 Headcount (56.52% of DCG Headcount; 56.62% of Salaries) 
Development Support: 10 Headcount (21.74% of DCG Headcount; 21.68% of Salaries)
Admin/Finance/Business Development/Marketing: 10 Headcount (21.74% of DCG Headcount; 21.70% of Salaries)

Our compensation reserve as of November 5th stands at 8.3 months of compensation reserve.  We are progressing toward our ideal reserve of one year’s compensation expense which would enable DCG to withstand substantial price volatility without impacting our operations.  Concurrently with increasing our reserve, we will continue to slowly reduce the percentage ask for Dash Core Group compensation relative to the available proposal funding.  With the last compensation proposal we reduced our compensation funding request from 50% of available monthly funding to 49% of funding in order to increase our allocation request toward other expense categories. With this proposal we are further reducing the compensation funding request from 49% to 47% of total available proposal funding.  

As previously communicated, we remain committed to restraining our total proposal requests to less than 60% of the available budget. Many of our costs are fixed, such as the costs to maintain testnet, so even this relatively small allocation change will enable significantly more funding to flow to marketing and business development activities to help the network grow. We have funded our fixed expenses in infrastructure and legal during Q3 ‘21 and for the next 6 months plan on submitting funding requests toward marketing and business development expenses (this quarter and Q1 ‘22). This will bring about a healthier expense ratio between compensation and non-compensation expenses.

Once we reach a steady state of 55 staff, our compensation run-rate is expected to be ~$385,000 per month.  With this proposal, we are asking for total funding of $450,000 per month. At the current Dash price of ~$195 and assuming this compensation proposal passes we will continue putting additional funds into our compensation reserve to further reduce risks to our operations.

As mentioned in our previous proposal, we have also undertaken a number of initiatives to align our compensation with market rates. This year we have adjusted salaries for USD inflation, adjusted compensation for staff role changes where applicable, and reinstated volunteers. In addition, we formed a compensation team to perform a comparison of Dash Core Group salaries to industry salaries and have made a select number of compensation adjustments based on our findings. These adjustments provided a number of developers with raises and should help improve retention going forward. We also rolled out a retention plan for key and critical DCG staff in August 2021. The retention plan has a vesting period of 3 years. In the next 3 months we plan on offering select additional subcontractors full-time positions with the company. Again, these initiatives are aimed at improving DCG retention.

If you would like more detail on DCG’s staff, financials, roadmap, and summary of our most recent accomplishments refer to our most recent quarterly call: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_GJagFdd0g

Note that in the appendix of the quarterly call presentation we also publish an org chart, which is current as of the end of the most recent quarter.

If you have any questions, please direct them to @glennaustin at dashcentral to ensure we are notified of your request.

Requested funding is as follows for the December through February budget cycles:
·   2,322.33 Dash for core team compensation per month ($450,500 USD @ $194 per Dash)
·           1.66 Dash / per month proposal reimbursement 
Total: 2,324 Dash per month

Note: Should any funding remain, we will apply it toward future compensation expenses and any related taxes.

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Discussion: Should we fund this proposal?

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4 points,2 years ago
Voting no x16. The Dash core team is spending too much which is often wasted on admin, compliance and few development results compared to unfunded coins and dev groups.
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0 points,2 years ago
Jesus hiring HR? All HR people should be dumped in the ocean.
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0 points,2 years ago
The HR person is focused on many initiatives. A few that come to mind are:
1) Facilitating recruiting and bringing on tech and devs to the organization
2) Handling all employee and staff contracts
3) Dealing with underperformance and aligning expectations among staff and managers

With an organization over 50 people, there was a need to bring in a part-time resource to handle these topics.
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1 point,2 years ago
Voting yes but my patience is wearing thin.
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0 points,2 years ago
Damn, a lot of hiring, is this going to affect the expcted date for building out the reserve fund, I like the extra hiring, just want to know if it has changed the target date for when you expect to have a 12 month reserve fund
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2 points,2 years ago
With the extra hiring and the reduced ask for DCG compensation as a percentage of total proposal funding the date we project to have a 12 month reserve is currently June 2022. Any increase in hiring or a drop in the price of Dash would further extend that timeline.

That said, with the 8 month reserve we currently have - we are in great shape. We can operate for 16 months at a price of $65/Dash without making any changes to the make-up of the team.

I do feel comfortable with the hiring we have completed in the last few months as it is key for us to attract developers to make sure we deliver according to our roadmap.
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5 points,2 years ago
It was amazing for me to hear Sam (QE) say that 90% of the recent hires which doubled the team size of DCG were tech hires, eg devs. This implies getting things done, more backports on Core, more work done on Evo, all the stuff we need, easy YES from me. Let's push DASH forward and make it better and better. Thanks for the new DIP too!
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