Quote from: bitexch on November 28, 2013, 11:48:51 PM

Quote from: vokain on November 28, 2013, 11:26:00 PM

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!

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.

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:

Quote

Have you put any thought around how you might actually structure these hires? How would they (we) be managed? How would you measure performance (ie is the intention to set KPIs or similar)? Informal or formally contracted? Would specific work packages be issued to developers under say for example a project management methodology like Prince2 or would developers be free to structure their contributions as they deem appropriate as per current?

Same on the funding front - how do you intend to make payment? On a weekly/monthly basis or per deliverable/specific goal? Will 'paid' developers still be be eligible to to claim bounties? At a full or reduced rate?

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.