Warning, mega-post ahead!
I skipped over a few posts when reading ... if there's something important I missed, let me know.
It should be said explicitly that Mastercoin's "first-mover advantage" - which JR mentions in his white paper - may disappear. Another project may hire full time developers, copy the Mastercoin code that has already been written, and complete its project before Mastercoin. This is not some highly improbable "worst case scenario", but a distinct possibility that everyone involved in Mastercoin should be concerned about.
This is not meant as a criticism of Mastercoin's current developers who, I know, are devoting what time they have to the project. What I write is directed at the board, which, in my view, is getting caught up in peripheral parts of the project, and is deferring judgment on questions of immediate importance. Rather than debating what currency we are going to pay developers in, we should hire developers!
EDIT: We should hire developers and, at least for now, simply ask them in what currency they would like to be paid.
+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.
Well, at least mastercoin has a few million dollars in it's development chest at this point. :-)
Maybe not for long, someone was talking buying Mastercoin with the Bitcoins fundraised, and paying the developers in Mastercoin. Pretty sure this would just harm the project. It will also create a pump from initially acquiring the Mastercoins, and then a dump when the developers sell them to pay their real life expenses.
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.
+100. Nxt is just around the corner, and may beat Mastercoin to launching the D.Ex.
Yeah apparently scheduled to launch at the very beginning of January, 2014. I don't know too much about NXT as I've only just looked into it, but their forums and users seem to be extremely active.
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
info@mastercoin.org ? That would help us get a better understanding of our relative status.
The next 6 months are critical. I believe a project manager is needed, someone with technical knowledge and management skills, who can hire and motivate the right people. A lot is at stake and the existing resources should be deployed intelligently and narrowly (i.e., not to fund every idea, but to use the bulk on the fundamentals) to hire the very best people to lead this project. Success at an early stage will create valuable dev MSCs that can fund the project for years going forward. The board needs to take decisive action to get the right people working on this project full time.
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!
Edit: at the same time, do we need a project manager? I'd like to ask the current developers their thoughts. Do self-organizing teams need/benefit from a top-down type of manager to get clear-cut objectives completed? I like to think that we just need the element of competition for truly grand prizes to speed things up fastest. If a manager indeed would help development, I would imagine a good manager would offer up their talents to a dev talent pool and put together a team. Bounties split as they're earned and as the team likes.
Again, thoughts?
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!
Why not found a start-up company and hire 2 - 4 full time developers and 1 project manager? Moreover, I believe MSC could attract many capitals too.
I think the right choice is the one that makes JR to commit 100% of his time to the project. You can bet that competition will commit full resources of their founders to their project.
Half-measures are not good for such a project. If the "buy back" is needed for JR to go "all-in" in MSC, then I strongly vote for the buy back.
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.
JR, however, has publicly stated he will spend more time with his family.
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.
Many people have said that they think it is imperative for JR to be on the project full-time, yet I have not seen anyone provide a reason as to why his full-time commitment to Mastercoin is necessary. Presumably the community feels that since JR conceived Mastercoin it follows that its development is dependent on him. But it's one thing to conceive an idea and it's another thing to develop it. Does anyone have reason to believe the JR would be such an exceptionally good developer? Are we really so sure it would be impossible to find a developer of comparable skill?
I find the community's attitude towards JR untenable, and I partially blame JR for not being more direct with the community: either he believes his full-time help is necessary for the development of Mastercoin, in which case, if the community and the board agree, we should do what we can to get him on board full-time. If on the other hand JR doesn't think his full-time commitment to Mastercoin is necessary for development, he ought to say so explicitly, that way we can stop focusing on how to get him to commit to the project, and start focusing on the project itself!
In my opinion, JR obviously doesn't think his full-time commitment to the project is necessary for its success, otherwise, he wouldn't have published his white paper without any code, and wouldn't have explicitly said that for two years he tried to convince someone else to undertake this project.
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.
You have to be careful here with that kind of blind "firehose" strategy. As the developer behind "masterdaemon", which will soon be released, I will probably soon be the "5th" or "6th" developer. Why, in that case, should any of the other developers help me at all, if all I'm essentially doing is pulling money away from them? This kind of distribution scheme has a negative incentive to grow the dev community.
I mean, hell, I'd love to get this product out, sit around, and collect a "paycheck" in MSC dev funds, but I don't think that's very effective (speaking against my self-interest here). I would pay the active developers a smaller amount of MSC on an ongoing basis (on top of what you pay them in any kind of full-time salary, etc), and save at least half of that new amount every month for devs that release something NEW into the
community. This will incentivise people to develop new products and services for Mastercoin, and it will encourage new devs to join up (or existing devs to develop additional products/services), instead of making some un-inviting "money club" where all you're doing when you join up is taking away money from someone else. Coins awarded would be a subjective measure of how valuable the community finds this new product (we could even have a voting thread of mechanism for it).
I learned a lot of lessons starting and growing companies. I see a lot of these same mistakes being made (or being proposed) in this project. Especially when it comes to compensating and motivating developers/employees. Do we have anyone on the board that has "boots on the ground" operational experience growing profitable software/tech startups with more than 10 employees?
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.
Ron did have a proposal that for those who seek security, they can be paid a salary and either they'd be entirely unincluded from bounties or their salary amount would be deducted before the award (which makes more sense)
At the same time, these are my reservations:
1. It is favoritism. Every should have the same chance at the same prizes, disregard any previous history or expertise.
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.
2. This favoritism places later contestants at a greater disadvantage than they already are. Aside from having to play catch up already, they now have to compete against those that don't have to work their day jobs through Mastercoin salaries, for a smaller portion of the pot that has already had slices allocated away for such salaries.
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.
3. What do you think is more effective? Paying someone(s) a salary so they may forget their other financial obligations and focus full time, or placing a large enough bounty with good enough directions so that anyone can begin developing as they see fit, work together as they see fit, and quitting their jobs as they see fit? I lean towards the latter.
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.
JR, RON, DAVID respectfully
, we need full time devs ASAP!
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
+1. Would love to see similar engagement from the other board members!
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/
