Seriously Human is the employment framework from Compare Basic.
The guiding intention of this framework is to have:
"a few thousand employees, in a few thousand years."
The intention behind this phrase is to create the foundation for a large organization without working so hard that we burn out. It also favours knowledge sharing that can outlive the founder(s) and bring long-term meaning and purpose to all employees and customers.
The foundational tenents of Seriously Human are:
Compensation is comprised of a base amount plus an increment that is a multiplied fraction of that base amount. Every position in the company can be expresses as an increment above the base amount.
Promotions are a title change and/or an increased increment amount.
For example:
Assuming that base compensation is set to $75,000 (this is low for software but a resonable number for our launch phase) with an increment of 3% the following would be true.
| Title | Increment | Amount | Dollars |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software Engineer | 1 | Base * 103% | $77,250 |
| Senior Software Engineer | 4 | Base * 112% | $84,000 |
| Staff Software Engineer | 8 | Base * 124% | $93,000 |
| Principal/Head Software Engineer | 12 | Base * 136% | $102,000 |
| C-Level | 16 | Base * 148% | $111,000 |
Each title difference is 4 increments and there would be titles between these, such as Senior Software Engineer 1.1 which would be equivilent to Software Engineer 1.5.
The current Base Compensation is $37,000 and the current Increment is 0%, meaning that everyone at the company (of which there is no-one yet) would make the same. As funding increases our ability to compensate each title would expand with the expansion of the Base Compensation value and the Increment.
Compare Basic has three voting classes intended to administor seperate areas of the business.
The way votes are evaluated depends on the situation. At times, it will be one big pool of one share one vote. At other times it will be a three way vote composed of the majority of the three classes.
There are currently 8075 shares, 7000 are in the Director class 1075 are in the Investor class, and the Employee class does not yet exist, becuase there are no employees. Employee shares will be comprised of existing Director shares, see the employee share section below for details.
The investor class is composed of everyone who contributed to the initial raise in early 2024 and makes up 1075 of the current shares. This class has an equal vote to the founder for things relating to the company budget and the option to abandon the early distribution plan that was presented when the initial raise happened. This right is administered by making these decisions require a majority in both classes.
Simply put, I as the founder can only change the budget with a mojority consent from the Investor class.
The director class is owned by members of the board, and votes within this class administer the definition of what markets the company pursues, and how those activities are funded for staffing and equipment costs. The director class is presntly my 86% share of the company as the founder. This is expected to be shared by other board members when they join the company.
The employee stock is awarded to employees in proportion to their Increment, and is transitioned from current Director shares. This stock is used for voting on adjustments to certain sections of the employee handbook.
Employee voting is likely to include topics such as
Team based decisions may also be put to a vote according to employee shares within that specific team. The office will to be more of a budget than a location, and how this budget is spent and the team schedule will be up to team voting. Topics are expected to cover thing such as
The intention of the three share classes is to make sure there is a way to address decisions that would other-wise be unrecognized in a tranditional top-down decision structure, while at the same time balancing the irrationality of desires by placing them in a structured discussion forum.
The company compensation for employees and dividends for shareholders is expected to be regulated by proposals which have different amounts of re-investment in the company. Employees and Investors are expected to be presented with choices of expanding the team, or paying out the proceeds of existing revenue in bonus or dividends.
There are existing by-laws about preferential divident payouts to the Investors until 125% of the initial investment is distributed, at that time we must re-define how dividend payouts function. This is expected to define the Employee bonus program as related to dividend payouts to Employees, Investors, and Directors.
It is not yet determined exactly how the Base and Increment compensation votes will be calculated. I have a few options in mind:
"All votes are treated equal" is surprisingly dis-empowering to employees because the number of employee shares is expected to be much smaller than Director shares until over 500 employees are hired.
It is likely that compensation ajustments require a majority within each of two of the three classes. This Balances out a scenario where one group is strongly mis-aligned with the other two.
Employee voting is expected to administer adjustments to the employee handbook and contribute to larger company efforts such as compensation changes and the pursuit or investment in new markets or products/services from the company.
Team voting is expected to be comprised of the employee shares of the team, for issues such as scheduling a work location (or lack therof) policies. Project management tools and paradigms may also be subject to this voting pattern.
It has been my understanding that people work in different ways and the way people work is always subject to change/improvement. It's also worth noting that family and medical circumstances can be a severe challenge to fit into one time-slot or location. I have had a number of times where my partner works an odd schedule compared to mine, and our personal time is abundent yet has no overlap. This scenario is similar to when a personal errand must take place during the day and work gets in the way.
There is a value to employees having experiences outside work that helps them clarify what we are accomplishing at Compare Basic and the Team Voting is expected to give teams the ability to decide what time commitments they need from each-other to work effectively.
This is a document specifying an object or responsibility that is inteneded to clarify what the company is expecting, or willing to part with.
There have been many times in my career where significant arguments arose over weather or not to change something people enjoyed and relied on. This can build a lot of volatility and territorial behavior. It is also somewhat misleading to think that everything a company does they do for a good reason. I would like to explicitly specify what was done intentionally vs what has just been around for a while.
Work when is the idea that every employee has an expected hourly commitment to the company. Employees do not have to have the same hourly commitment, and are expected to remain within the lower and upper bounds of this commitment. It's likely that most employees will be in the 35-45 hours a week range, or the 15-25 hours a week range. With a mandatory business day off once a quarter or more. This quarterly day off is in addition to company holidays and an amount of vacation time common in the region where they live.
Hours are logged on a weekly basis, but compensation remains constant, until a period of time has elapsed. This may be a month of under or over-working that triggers a review, or it may be more recent than that. The intention is to deliver consistent compensation to employees while protecting them from over-engagement and serve as an early warning system for detecting under-engagement.
While building the Caneka Runtime I became aware that if I overworked I ended up with more code to delete than use. At the same time, if I let myself work too few hours I often had a disatisfying amount of progress on the project. This is a common scenario I have seen play out among artists and makers: too many hours has bad results but too few hours can cause stagnation. The expectation of Work When is to balance out employees who want to recieve less income for less of a time commitment with employees who would get carried away and spin out of control if they became too engrossed in their work.
There is also no harm in our company hiring 3 people at full comensation or 6 people at half compensation. I expect we will find bumps along the way due to the unconventional nature of this in software companies, but lots of other industries handle part time work effectively, and I think there is enough value to pursue this model of compensation.
This is the process of reviewing employees and managers at the same time. The inspiration is that most employment issues are whole or in part due to training over-sight or mentorship issues. Mentorship issues are a two-way street with the mentor's level of engagement recieving questions from the mentee making up a likely equal portion to the mentees participation and efforts.
The Double Edged Review process is inteneded to make all reviews both positive and negative, and all reviews be for managers and employees at the same time.
Seriously Human is intended to be a blend of the best of what I have seen in my Software Career for mid-size to large companies, and what I have seen work in the hourly service industry jobs. I've worked effectively from home and in co-working spaces and on hobby-projects, or coprorate teams.
All of the early accomplishments from Compare Basic (Caneka Runtime, business development, and early fundraising) has been done without set hours, without agile, and without code reviews, or any other formal project management framework. Seriously human seeks to blend those forms of productivity with the best of what I've seen from corporations. Most notably: predictable schedules and the ability to build with consistently funded teams.
Simply Human was named after I described some of these concepts to one of my crowd-funding investors and he said "Sounds like taking humans seriously".
Let's hope we can build something that can become "a few thousand employees, in a few thousand years".