Raise the salary of core team member Artem

[aliatiia]

Simple Summary

Increase the monthly salary of core team member Artem K (@banteg) to 150K per year (12.5k per month). This represents a ~56% increase of the current 96k per year (8k per month). The current 96k represents an entry-level compensation in the software industry. Artem’s contributions are evident and are always shared publicly, and belong to the senior developer category.

Motivation

• Reward and retain talent
• Meet minimum industry compensation standards for a senior-level developer position

Specification

Starting the month of October 2020 Artem’s salary is increased from 8k to 12.5k per month.

Rationale

• Artem has been contributing to the implementation of yEarn products and patches, and responding to emergencies at an outstanding pace
• Artem work is always shared publicly which is valuable for communication and education of the community
• Artem has been an advocate for yEarn in the ecosystem, e.g. creating Maker proposals for the benefit of yEarn

Poll:

Snapshot

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

[Maki]

Deserved and should even be higher in my opinion.

Banteg is an amazing individual and yEarn is privileged to have him among his contributors.

[Governor]

100% support
Yearn is lucky to have him

[jtai]

Well deserved - 10000% yes

[milkyklim]

@aliatiia replaced your poll with snapshot version. Please, use it next time.

[fiestyfemale]

wait a second, aren’t onboarded members paid in yUSD which would increase their salary by 60.57%/anno anyways?? that would have his salary at 330k/year in two years ???

[milkyklim]

Valuable comment from @fiestyfemale. All internal payments are denominated to yUSD.

[spacemonkey]

100% support, banteg supporting lots of fronts not only dev.
His communication and interaction on different channels with the community is outstanding as well.

Glad he is here.

[Balotelli45]

well deserved. In favor of this proposal!

[Dankmonty]

Is this 12.5K yUSD or USD equivalent?

[dudesahn]

yUSD is no longer increasing at 60% yearly and I highly doubt we will ever get anywhere close to that again. However, it is a valid point that if we’re going to denote things in yUSD vs $, we should acknowledge that this is at least a 15% raise that will probably inflate further at ~10-15% yearly.

So while Artem is doing amazing things at a blistering pace for Yearn, we should be clear that this is approximately 12.5k yUSD which is actually $14,500 at today’s price of yUSD ($1.16), or $174,000 yearly (not taking into account yUSD inflation).

Definitely not saying he still doesn’t deserve it, just thought I would add that information for those who may have been unsure.

[kx9x]

The proposal says 150k with no unit of measure. Can we make sure to make it clear that this is yUSD and not USD in the future?

Important to make polls as clear as possible. Especially when dealing with internal funding!

Anyway, $174,000 a year seems fair enough for this type of work. Hope it passes!

[fiestyfemale]

op’s proposal is highly misleading in that regard. but on a more deeper level, while I’m sure banteg is great, he did arb the entire enm thing right? he kinda dmitted to making 65k by that. and now he gets >100k in donations??? and a payraise of 60%???

also on his public wallet he has 750k ???

this kinda seems like we’re giving very wrong incentives to be honest, especially the fact that he would’ve made lots of money with his insider knowledge about the entire enm situation!!!

I don’t agree. Sorry.

[gabi]

I’ll be voting YES. I wonder however whether the best route is not a fixed salary + a set of incentives. YFI holders have financial benefit from the fees the system accrues, why not tie part of core devs remuneration (in addition to that salary) to those fees? I.e. if fees are above X for N weeks then a certain % starts accruing to a Dev Fund and keep accruing as long as that threshold isn’t broken on the downside. The only danger I see is moral hazard where riskier strategies may be put in place, but that would also kill the platform’s cachet hence any hope for future payouts.
I apologize if this has been discussed before.

[Dinsey]

This seems a good idea and worth some thought with regards to precedents set for future team payments. Incentive payment could be based on growth in pool size as opposed to returns perhaps, as this would imply valuable usage over just high risk strategies. Maybe with some timelock/vesting period.

[Darehwinston]

The guy deserves it. I’m for this proposal.

[TheSouthSeaCompany]

Previously, multisig has been authorized to make spending decisions including hiring. I think it is inappropriate for governance to micromanage salary decisions in such an arbitrary way, especially as we don’t have full visibility into what each team member has been working on, and hence it seems clear we would be awarding banteg in part for his work being more visible.

This would only make sense in a context where governance makes decisions on all hiring, e.g. having periodic approval votes for each core team member in the same way that board members of listed companies are up for re-election periodically. In the current state of affairs, it is not needed, and this vote would effectively be a popularity contest. I’m against.

For the record, I am not opposed to increasing banteg’s compensation per se.

[Matternhorn]

Not only should he be paid more, he should be paid in YFI as well.

[Dankmonty]

100% agreed with all of these points. I’d also like to see a higher APY to governance stakers from fees from the new stuff launching and vaults reopening before we start looking for reasons to add to our overhead (especially since multisig established existing rates just a few short weeks ago). With that said, he’s been great and I’m not against the idea of paying him more in general. The payments being in yUSD does need to be considered, as that is already immediately +15% and then effectively increasing pay every year by 10-15% as it is now, as dudesahn mentioned.

[fiestyfemale]

I see so many posts of ‘the guy deserves it’ etc. But he openly acknowledged to arbing the emn contracts, which by itself is really not something anyone even remotely associated with yearn should do (i hope, this isn’t improving a imperfect market, it’s literally taking money from the guy after you) – and the best part is he has more than 1M in the wallets that we known about.

This entire thing looks just like finance 1.0.0 managers giving each other huge bonuses, the rich getting richer. If this is the way DeFi goes it’s doomed.

Once more, totally opposed.