But it could also lead to rampant corruption, cronyism, and people just living off their reputation rather than doing the actual work. I think this is a question that must be considered carefully:
Who can be manager? And how can we incentivize managers to make right decision?
The new way is radically simple, the network hires managers, then managers hire employees. You guys will negotiate pay with the managers, then you're delegating much of the day-to-day operations to the project management team. As for stopping abuse, we're talking about having to get your primary and secondary manager to "sign off" on expenses. This means if you can't come to an agreement between the three of you, nothing gets paid. In the end it'll allow us to move really fast and keep abuse down to a minimum. So managers are responsible for reviewing and approving expenses, if the employee and two managers pay for something the network doesn't like, the network can talk to the management team and voice the concerns. These are going to be the primary point of contact for the network, so that's how we direct the ship.
The employees are agreeing to do a specific amount of work with their manager, so they can't just live off of the system. You have to work to get paid for it under this model. The budget system money is a scarce resource that we need to be careful about to avoid the situations you're talking about.
The nice thing is that we're going to be moving to sentinel, which is the "brain", so every part of this can be tested with trial and error. We can roll out test implementations, then revert them or tweak them. I imagine we'll be pivoting pretty quickly as we realize different goals.