Organization Structure
We, Slime Mold.
We strive to be the organizational equivalent of a slime mold: an efficient and decentralized organism composed of wholly autonomous and individually viable parts. This approach embeds the borrowed ideals of equity, adaptability, and trust into our operations and structure.
Compensation + Benefits
Every employee is paid the same amount for their time, regardless of skills, tenure, geography, or responsibility. Current salaries, and the formula we use to calculate them, are public in our compensation overview.
All full-time employees are eligible for the same package of benefits. This currently includes medical, dental, vision, and life insurance with manageable premiums and deductibles. We don’t have a retirement plan at this time, but are hoping to establish one in the next few months. The current set of benefits offered to employees are available in our compensation overview.
Time
Each employee sets their own work hours. Accounting for weekends (104.35 days per year), federal holidays (11 days per year), and five weeks of vacation (25 days per year), full-time work averages out to 4.926 hours per day. Full-time employees can use whatever approach they want to hit this average over time, but shouldn’t carry balances significantly above or below this target for an extended period of time, and will be peer-pressured into taking vacation. Employees are only expected to record a precise log of their time when working for a client that is billed hourly.
If an employee wants to work part-time, we support that, and will pay them in proportion to the time they can commit to the work. Part-time status should not be adjusted more frequently than on a quarterly basis. Benefits may be impacted by changes to part-time status.
Silicon Ally employees are free to pursue any other work that they choose to, from side projects up to full alternative employment, so long as it doesn’t impact their ability to meet the work-time expectations they’ve established. We think employees learn the most and do their best work when they’re free to explore and build outside of their role.
Management
We don’t have a reporting structure - each employee is responsible for the work they pick up and is broadly accountable to the other employees.
We do not have a structured performance evaluation system, instead we’ll foster a culture of humility and frequent feedback.
Any employee can call a vote to propose hiring a new employee. If approved by a supermajority (⅔) of all employees in a public vote, a hiring process is kicked off. Hiring then proceeds by assembling a group of volunteers to form a hiring committee, following the constraints laid out in our DEI policy and the recommendations of the hiring group are proposed back to a full-employee public vote. If approved by a supermajority, the candidate is hired.
Any employee can call for an anonymous vote to fire an existing employee. If approved by a supermajority of all employees (⅔), the proposition is binding.
Any employee can call an anonymous vote to propose an action to the Board of Directors. If approved by a majority (½) of the voting employees, the proposition will be formally considered and responded to by the Board of Directors.
Communication
Employees are expected to communicate effectively in highly asynchronous environments - and should default to written, stateful, searchable communication. The gold standard here is handling every communication as if it is one you’re writing to a coworker who is on vacation and will return in a week. Include context, a clear and precise set of questions or information, and a timeframe for resolution with every query. Try to structure your work so that it is amenable to this format of communication.
We avoid regularly scheduled meetings - they can typically be an email.