A worker was designed to be the employee of Bitshares blockchain and work for the whole ecosystem. This innovative mechanism indeed played great role at the beginning of Bitshares 2.0, when a bunch of talented “workers” gathered as core dev team to make Bitshares 2.0 happen. Besides the core dev team, some other “workers” added much value to Bitshares too, such as @cass ’s UI, @xeroc ’s script and documents.
However, debates also accompanied the worker ever since the first day, and a few top voting proxies even reject all workers without any bias, which means the worker mechanism is not accepted by the most. The consequence is that every worker proposal is hard to get approved.
At the beginning I stand the point that we should encourage people to work for Bitshares and apply for workers. However, now I am more and more inclined to support the point that worker system should be abandoned and I highly suggest that bounty should replace worker. Here are a few reasons.
1\ Bitshares 2.0 is generally a very stable system, which has been running without any hardfork for months. What we need at the current stage is bug fixing or customized new features, instead of touching the bottom codes. Therefore, we don’t really need full time workers to work for Bitshares. Both bug fixing or the demand of customized new features can be done by bounty.
2\ Bitshares 2.0 is too poor to feed a lot of workers, and the dilution due to workers actually stops potential investors to join. The “dilution” of Bitshares is sometimes “notorious” in blockchain community.
***2\Worker system actually discourages volunteering. If you grow with Bitshares community since the old days when there was no worker, you may recall that Bitshares community was actually very active, with a lot of volunteers working for Bitshares for free. But now, some of them hesitate to do it because they feel unfair seeing workers get paid while they don’t. ***
***3\ Workers are not more loyal than others. It is embarrassing that most of the past workers disappeared once their worker contract expired, or they ask for new worker contract to clean the old bugs they made. ***
On the other hand, the long time loyal members of community who are contributing a lot to the system are not workers or were not paid much. I can list a few, such as openLedger, blockpay, beyondbitcoin, transwiser, btsbots, btsabc,hellobts, etc. According to the evaluation criteria of worker, anyone on this list deserves a worker proposal, but they are still happily working for Bitshares without being worker.
Why I support Bounty to replace worker?
I believe we still have a lot of talents in our community, they are good programmers or good marketers, and they are pleased to help bitshares by accepting the bounty. They will be rewarded by bounty and honor.
1\Bounty will let people compete therefore better results can be expected compared with non-competing worker, not to mention the efficiency and quality.
2\ Don’t worry that no one respond to the mission. If it happens, it means this mission is not important enough to increase the bounty.
A normal flow of bounty can be:
Shareholders feedback the demand firstly, then the committee is responsible for summarizing these demands and organizing voting to create bounty, then waiting for people to submit their work, then shareholders decide whether the work is qualified for bounty or not.
The above is just my preliminary thoughts, whereas some details might need to be reconsidered, so welcome any comments.