Topic: MasterCoin: New Protocol Layer Starting From “The Exodus Address” - page 54. (Read 448462 times)

The project can progress without JR.
However the project will move much faster with full support from JR.
This is for a few reasons:

1. He owns a lot of MSC, and carries a lot of weight. Many people look to him. So unless he supports a particular hire, feature or project, it is bound to be delayed. (I want his relative weight to decrease in order to remove him as a single point of failure in the project. Selling some MSC now would be a great start).

2. JR is a board member and he definitely should remain one. He is working on freeing up his time, and is already dedicating more time and effort than some of the other board members. "Kicking JR out of his project" is so off the table that it's in the barn with the dogs. Won't happen.

3. We never formalized the expectations from board members, but we are all busy people. Try not to judge.
Board members need to either: be available for discussion, or work to reducing the project's dependencies on them. I am pushing for both.

4. It's holidays... please be patient for a bit. I'm pushing this super hard, give me a chance to do what I do. Thanks!

As I have already argued, I don't think that JR is instrumental to the development of the project because he founded it. If you disagree, please explain why.

If JR doesn't have enough time to give his input and votes, then he shouldn't be a board member. If someone isn't able to fulfill the duties of his position, he shouldn't have that position. Is JR an exception?

Guys, this forum thread and bitcointalk is not just driving me crazy, it is not productive.
We need better forum software and we need it now.
I say skip the votes, let's move to Discourse, from what I hear they are world class (I haven't checked this myself, but I have tremendous respect for their team so I want to do a pilot with them).

Here is an email I just sent them. If anyone knows people on the Discourse team, please help me push this ASAP.


Whoa, after reading this I realize I use "you guys" way too much ... oh well.

I started a thread to discuss nominating full-time developers for Mastercoin: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/mastercoin-nominations-for-full-time-developers-351077

Warning, mega-post ahead!
I skipped over a few posts when reading ... if there's something important I missed, let me know.


+1 to hiring developers ASAP!
And not just developers. We need to build a solid all around team.

I am promoting this any way I can and nudging and pushing board members constantly about the need to keep accelerating.

Holidays are a big time sync-hole so everything is taking 5 times slower than it should.


I don't see this as a likely scenario. I am rather against doing this and I doubt we'll get a majority board vote to approve this.


Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
Can someone please do a thorough analysis of Nxt (and any other relevant competitors e.g Invictus and Ripple), post this as a separate thread, and email that to [email protected] ? That would help us get a better understanding of our relative status.


Agreed!

We have a position open for a project manager, and are talking with 1-2 potential candidates.
If you know any more, please send them our way ASAP!


I need a project manager.
I am finding myself with ever decreasing amount of free time (all dedicated to Mastercoin, strategic partnerships, hiring etc.), and I am losing touch with the state of the project. Please see the job posting and send us your resume if applicable!


I do not believe that J.R.'s unwillingess to commit to the project has anything to do with funding.
For the public record I think that even if J.R. starts working full time for MSC, he should not take any additional equity or wage whatsoever.
I will similarly not take any further equity or payment for my work. Both of us already have enough MSC.

I have emailed J.R my plan for an effective way for him to quit his day job. TL;DR - hire a personal assistant and delegate delegate delegate any and all pains (e.g. how to sell MSC for USD) to him.


That's his complete right. In general when I'm hiring people for Mastercoin, I never state any expectations of hours, just the expectation of a "50% position", "100% position", or whatever. It is up to J.R to manage how much he believes his 100% should be in terms of hours, according to his preferences.


I believe that J.R is currently one of the bottlenecks for this project.
Being the founder and a key board member, his input and vote is needed on a lot of issues, and we simply don't get enough J.R time right now.

I hope to be able to persuade him to change that and help us to maintain and increase our acceleration.


My hiring strategy is the following:

I want to attract and build 2-3 great development teams (preferably 2 ... 1 is too few, 3 is too sparse).
I want to hire the lead developers of these teams, and give them ample budget to hire more developers.

Consolidating fire power here is very important, otherwise we'll end up with 10 half working implementations instead of 2 really great ones.

I would rather we switch off the bounty system for these teams almost completely. There could be bounties in terms of bonuses, and there could not be (I would rather not commit on it right now). Instead I just want to offer them what I think are reasonable wages considering everything that's going on, and empower these 2 leads to build their teams correctly. There could be some intra-team work / joint infrastructure that might be managed in the form of bounties.

Note that what I consider is a reasonable wage is below market, possibly way below market wages.
I won't get into the details before we've had a chance to communicate exact figures to Devs, but I want to explain my reasoning:

1. Almost anyone working on the project is expected to either own or get paid in MSC, thus having a direct financial incentive to make the project terrific. This is akin to early stage startups which often pay less or way less than market.
2. The non-monetary rewards. I myself took a huge pay cut in my past when I quit Google after 5 months of work in order to work for a small startup. The lower wage was very significant for me then ... but looking back it really wasn't. The chance to work with really awesome people, contribute, learn and connect was worth the pay cut I took and more.

I will elaborate with more details about my plan after the board and devs have had time to sync on that in private.


Yeah, we favor those who get in first, just like any startup. There is a super concrete benefit to that - we show them we reward their early enthusiasm with our trust.

All monthly contracts will have a 30 day termination clause, so if a developer isn't pulling his weight, the damage will be limited.


Then perhaps they should not compete with the leads, but rather join up to them and split the pie in some way with them.
Lead Devs will have a budget for building their team using whatever management style they want.
Later devs should team up with the Lead Devs - that is the entire point.


I prefer the low salary convertible to equity. This is simpler and more predictable for developers, and I find it hard to believe most developers would quit their day job for bounties that may or may not come. This is concrete ... and they need concrete in order to make that jump.


As you see from my above replies, I fully fully fully agree and I can't stress this more.
Thanks for supporting this view, it helps me convince the board faster


Sorry for not spending much time on bitcointalk ... I really am working on many other Mastercoin related things ... trust me!
I just don't have as much time to spend on the forum. The single huge thread isn't helping either.

Just to give you a clue about how busy I am:

http://ripper234.com/p/so-i-dont-have-time-to-pick-a-personal-assistant/

You're obviously holding a double standard: why does the burden of responsibility fall on someone who wants to make a longer-term commitment, but the person who works for a bounty is blameless? Your personal prejudices are starting to show through.


When someone applies for a full-time job, he most likely will submit a resume, demonstrating his experience, his skills, etc.. Are you suggesting that a resume is worthless? If the system of hiring full-time employees based on their previous experience were as uncertain and hare-brained as you make it out to be, then one would think that companies which follow such a procedure would face catastrophic results all the time!

Your counter-argument has nothing to do with whether we scare away developers. You have failed to actually engage with that point.


Your attitude seems inconsistent: you want to avoid the risk of missing out on talent by not hiring full time developers, but you don't want to avoid the risk of missing out on talent by only offering bounties. It would be good if you could explain how you reconcile this contradiction.


That salaries add complexity doesn't mean that that complexity is unnecessary. Indeed, it is disconcerting to see that a member of the board would let the simplicity of one option determine his opinion so completely, when it has been argued that the simple option gravely endangers the project.

I don't see any organized development teams. I don't see cooperation. I see different developers all working on stuff and I cannot keep up with who is doing what or what progress is. For a project as big as this you need daily reports among developers and weekly reports to the community. We have a blog which provides some of that but it's not detailed. We don't get to see for instance a daily changelog with comments. If there is a bug that a particular developer is having a problem with is there a bugzilla or some other similar type of setup so we can see the outstanding bugs?

It's not about the prizes. The prizes are just incentives to motivate people to get involved in the process. It's actually about building the best possible Mastercoin protocol that can be built. This protocol has to be something which can allow many businesses and developers to build on top of it. Think of the Mastercoin development team as being as important as the Mozilla development team or the Chrome or Linux development team. Those teams aren't organized around a web forum using bounties, they all have a combination of salaried developers paid by sponsors or volunteers. Study successful projects to find the right combination but from what I have seen there is a role for full time salaried developers.

I don't get that idea at all. The Mastercoin project is so vast that even if you had 5 teams of 5 full time developers you'd still have so many trivial or experimental features to implement that you'd have room for bounties.

For example reputation should be built on top of the Mastercoin protocol and the core developers shouldn't be concerned with building reputation functionality. The core developers shouldn't have to be focused on little details of the user interface. The core developers should be doing the really difficult stuff that the rest of us cannot do. It should be highly specialized experts working on features which are truly hard and which require 12 hour days of contemplating, designing, coding, and bug testing. If you understand what is involved you'll know it's not something that can be considered part time work and it's not really bounty work. You cannot work on a bunch of other projects or have a full time job and do this on the side, you should be doing this full time and give total effort to it that it deserves.

Tachikoma knows a lot about the Mastercoin protocol as it currently is and on the parts he is working on. He cannot be expected to focus on every aspect. He probably should be team leader for the part he is working on, but what about all the other parts of the protocol spec left to be implemented?

I think you need team leaders so that when new people join in they can go and ask that person how stuff works, how the design should be, how the code should look, and what needs to be fixed. It's just in my opinion a bad idea to be decentralized and unorganized. You can be decentralized and fully organized.

1) I'm not saying that salaried devs will be hard to find that will utilize political and managerial duties, it's just that I feel that many of the current devs we have prefer to stay out of politics if they can avoid it. in my "additional thoughts" quote one post above, I said that if a manager would actually turn out to be useful, I would hope they would offer their managerial talents to the devs and they can figure it out from there. Sort of like how a band and band manager works, they know best what is fair within a team. This would work under the current bounty system, especially when it is presented that there is a huge prize available.

2) I think that is up for the person who has to make the choice of deciding between longer-term commitment and the possible awesome rewards at this end of the rainbow. You posit we scare away developers because we don't offer salaries. How do we even justify giving a newcomer a salary if they have had nothing to show for it before? Again, for the third fourth time, unearned windfall. It's a risk that is made irrelevant when we have bounties for clear-cut criteria, which is true for developing the spec implementation.


This is  an excerpt from one private email, as a response to JR when he asked the devs what it would take to have them on as full hires:

It echoes what I have been thinking with even more specificity. Salaries add unnecessary complexity and questions to be answered that you do not have with bounties.

vokain, you seem to be making two different points: (1) that salaried developers will hard to find, because of the political and managerial duties that come with a salary; (2) salaried developers are bad for the development for the project. I think it's important to state these two points separately. I have tried to respond to (1) in a previous posting, what are your thoughts?

Regarding (2): If I understand you correctly, you are worried that by having a pre-established team of salaried workers, we'll be scaring away talent that is not salaried. But one could easily apply this same argument to bounties: by only providing bounties, and not a real salary, we are scaring away developers who are looking for a longer-term commitment and job security. I not only think this is possible, but even quite likely!

No one is saying we shouldn't have bounties *on top of* salaried positions. What the community is rejecting is the much more inflexible idea of having bounties *instead of* salaried positions.

There is always the possibility that one is missing out on talent. The problem is that while trying to account for every potentially missed opportunity, you may hurt the project. I believe that right now Mastercoin is being hurt by not having both salaried developers as well as bounties.

There has been and will be cooperation. Why do we need to pay individuals salaries and hope they "cooperate" as if they weren't already? If there's already the incentive to work together, distribute strengths as necessary, and efficiently organize roles in order to solve the problem at hand and secure the prize? The detriment of the salary is that when you have an official salaried "development team," it presents the idea that we already have the developers we need and we just need to wait and let them do work now that they are paid a salary. This is not conducive towards attracting new and possibly better talent!


 
additional thoughts:

quote from board emails:

quotes from earlier:

Competition isn't everything. At some point you need cooperation between developers and contests don't really help people to cooperate. What you need to do is pay development teams. Assign certain developers to a team and pay them all as they build something together.

So if a feature gets built by a team of 5 developers then team panther for instance should get paid as a group. Also you need to rely on collaborative software other than these forums to allow developers to collaborate and deal with bugs.

So my advice is to form development teams and give each team a code name. Give each team a particular area of focus and make each team select a team leader. So if one team is working on smart properties and another team is working on stocks and another the user currencies now you have three teams working on important features.

The team leaders from each team should be in communication with each other and should manage collaboration between the teams. The team leader should give a weekly report on the progress on the forum and give daily progress reports to the other teams via email. Use contests for purposes like smaller less critical features, experimental features, bug testing, or bug reporting.

I think full time developers are necessary. Contests can only work for so long. Look at the Linux development mailing list. You need between 5-10 full time developers and the money exists to easily hire them so why not? That does not mean they should be employees. Pay them in Bitcoin and give them tasks that suit full time development such as debugging, security oriented, the graphical user interface, quality assurance, and more.

Don't do it in the typical way. Hire only the developers who accept being paid in Mastercoins. If they won't accept being paid in Mastercoins they shouldn't be full time developers for the Mastercoin protocol. Reserve that for the people who truly believe in what Mastercoin will be. For developers who do not have enough money to pay bills through the month and if they are truly skilled and proven then they should take place in the bounties to earn a spot as a full time developer. What I think would be a bad idea would be to bring in developers who are not a part of the Bitcoin community, or the Mastercoin community, and give them the most privileged position of full time developer. It's not just about the developer having skill but these are people who have to be trusted.

Also have a look at Ciyam and see if it can solve some of these problems.
http://ciyam.org/open/
Example:
http://ciyam.org/open/?cmd=view&data=20121221072815393000&ident=M100V137&chksum=45c95736

No...embarrassingly enough I am not on that list. I just requested Aric to add me, hopefully I can see the previous messages.

No apologies necessary at all . It's a difficult topic with lots of differing views.

There are ongoing discussions in the Dev mailing list on how we can make devs spending more time on the project a reality - have you seen those?

Thanks

My apologies zathras, thank you for your valuable input, you have no idea know how much it is needed with these conversations! I guess I didn't consider that others did not see Bitcoin as a savings account like I do (I pull money from my coins as necessary for expenses and spending and don't worry about the price. Doing this has served me very well, and I do recommend it, though of course, I'm not a professional financial advisor. I believe this will be the majority tendency in the future).

 To you, as a veteran of the process thus far, does upping the bounty size work better or worse than having a preconfirmed salary in terms of motivation and results? Not only to the person with the salary but to those without as well, the whole system.

What would you like to see

Different topic.

For those interested, reminding everyone that there is an ongoing 100 BTC bounty for testing the code our developers have been hammering away at and making sure they work well. This is the best way any person can help the developers and the Mastercoin project as a whole.

With the utmost of respect, I'm not aware of any developer who has earned enough to live off.

Full disclosure, I have made $6,000 fiat (from the contest, I converted BTC to dollars immediately - I'm conservative!).  That's well under a months salary.

My hours contributed are probably a few hundred by now.

I also have 375 MSC rewarded, which if I cashed out would be worth quite a lot I believe at current rates?  But unless I cash them out I can't use them to pay my bills & can only guess at their future value.

Not trying to be flippant but the assertion that us developers are wealthy enough already to quit full time work just isn't true.

Thanks!

I do not think that the size of the bounties were disproportionate to the work they did.  They definitely earned it and this sort of consequence only serves to increase developer incentive.

"I would only point out that whether you're right or not doesn't in-itself mean that salaries are either good or bad."
I can agree. I want what is best for Mastercoin as well guys. I just think bounties are more effective than salaries in the case of core dev with clear criteria.

If you think that the size of the bounties was disproportionate to the amount of work the devs did, this would indicate that the size of the bounties was not carefully enough considered. I would only point out that whether you're right or not doesn't in-itself mean that salaries are either good or bad.

A little while ago we hired a PR firm, which was meant, in part, to find developers. As far as I know, that has not come to anything yet, and so I am proposing that rather waiting for the PR firm to bring developers to us, we find developers that whose work we like, and whom we think would be a good fit for Mastercoin. Anyone who wants to nominate a developer should provide an explanation as to why she's a good fit, and also provide some examples of her code, experience etc. (a link to a Github page is good).

It is this kind of transparent, democratic hiring process which is necessary for Mastercoin to succeed, and which, in my view, has really been missing thus far.

Whoever is interested in this idea should post on the following thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/mastercoin-nominations-for-full-time-developers-351077 . This would of course be a good place for updates regarding the PR firm's search for developers.

Yeah, I think it's a pretty appealing case for the devs right now to spend their time on Mastercoin, salary or not.

Again, if I was a contestant, if after I had already earned 500 MSC and whatever the BTCs that first $30000 contest is worth now, if I was faced with the decision to leave my job or dedicate more of my time towards earning more of these high value coins that have already shown to have value, (options/equity in the startup basically), I'd probably leave after getting a taste of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. To each their own, that's the point. If I could earn 50-100 BTC in a few weeks-months of working on code that I am confident I could get done, I definitely would!  Especially after earning serious wealth. If you were already awarded BTCBTCBTC and made more in a month's creativity than your job paid in a year+, and had the chance to do that again, you have a choice to make.

Yes, cryptocurrency has convicted me strongly of competition. Competition creates some crazy crazy innovations and brings the best people together. Already confirmed rewards (salaries) kind of go against that. Did the DARPA Grand Challenge reward anyone before the contest? Once the contestants have proven themselves, they receive the bounty which enables them to spend more TIME on such projects. The best way to encourage further dev is by providing further incentive for development of objectives with very clear criteria, ie bounties.




requoting for the second time for further emphasis: