i think BM and his men have been fully focused on the development of BTS X.
And i just think the first priority for the other staff (who cannot programme ) should be concentrated on finding many IT talents to join 3I.
i think at first, we do not lack of moeny right now (due to AGS), second, we have so many projects to be finished, music lotto, keyhotee etc.
I think we do not have enough people for programming right now, and i think 3I does not put their biggest effort into this issue. ( you might do something on this issue but not enough )
i don't know if i am right, this is just my opinon and advice based on my experience: i am once in charge of a team of nearly 100 people.
at last, best wishes to you all.
Thanks for your response and I speak on behalf of the whole Bitshares software development team when I say we appreciate your advice. I and many of the BitShares team members are managing the growth of this software development team closely. We can't grow too large, too quickly, and we could not produce the software we aim to release this summer without the team we have now.
Every software developer/engineer we have is very talented and well trained. Some have 15 or 20+ years experience, advanced degrees, some have turned down Google to be here in Blacksburg with us, and have degrees from the best computer science schools in the world. Later today we have Vikram joining us who recently received his masters in computer science from the US 2014 ranked-No. 1 computer science graduate school in the nation, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he decided against pursuing a PhD to instead become a practitioner outside academia and hit the ground running with Bitshares. Vikram has already contributed much to our BitShares Toolkit in Github and is very happy with the work he's already volunteered. I couldn't be more pleased with his voluntary contributions and his motivation to date. Since Vikram emailed me months ago inquiring if we were hiring, he took it upon himself to find Nikolai at CMU where they both resided at the time, and began coding with Nikolai and getting involved before I could even respond. This initiative gets you noticed.
My ideal candidate for hire for the Bitshares software development team is someone who has followed our work for sometime and knows the domain/what we are doing, has forked our code from Github, and made positive contributions to our codebase. Maybe he or she has posted in the forums (reddit, bitsharestalk.org, bitcointalk.org, etc) and done a good job of promoting Bitshares to others who don't understand it yet. Hey, blockchains are hard to program! If it were easy it would done cheaper and lot quicker.
It makes it a very easy decision for me and the Bitshares core leadership to pull the trigger on a hiring decision when we have someone like Nikolai (toast), Nathan, and Vikram practically knocking on Bytemaster's door in Virginia to get involved in the action. We actively look for people like this and when I start noticing them I start talking with Daniel Larimer almost immediately. My radar is always up for talent and passion applied by developers.
Considering swings in price of all crypto, we must be vigilant in making wise hiring decisions. I assure you we will seek to acquire new talent and retain the developers who've already joined us full time or part time. What we don't want is to hire too many developers and dilute the efforts of the team we have now, by bogging them down with too many hours training/assisting new devs. The Summer of Code has officially begun and we will manage the software development funds to empower a lean, potent software development team and run a successful company beyond this summer into next year. Thank you again for your feedback.