Thank you to @puniaviision for starting this conversation here and to @dylan for continuing it here. It seems to me that sincere thought, time and motivation is now going into this process - from many angles. This is a positive development and it’s good to shine light into this issue, which I think is the most important issue in the DAO. This is probably not easy to surface and communicate and I think these ambitions are spot on:
Key Results - How You’ll Know if the EWG succeeds
Indices
- Rebalances : Infrastructure to handle 10 rebalances a week safely w/o MEV, slippage issues
- New Products : Preparedness to launch 2 index products a month
- Maintenance : Ability to handle 100 metagovernance transactions a week
Leverage Indices
- Supply Scalability : Infrastructure to scale ETH 2x FLI to 2,000,000 supply (400k today) for 10 products
- Maintenance Scalability : Teams and infrastructure to support 10 products, their parameter updates, notifications, etc.
- New Products : Preparedness to launch and support 10 products
I want to get a negative comment out the way first before moving on to more positive things and trying to move this conversation forward for all of our and our clients’ benefits.
First, it is very disappointing to get to such an acute choke point situation regarding engineering resources, period, and without much prior remedial action or future planning (unless I missed it). I personally find communication and especially planning regarding this most important resource in the DAO to be insufficient, and hard to understand given:
- Set’s 28% long-term incentive in the DAO
- A fast-growing community of people since many months ago who are committing real time and money to the Coop
- Rapidly rising AuM
- Great PR and product traction
- And, general market understanding from thought leaders that we are beginning to win this space!
We have been operating since the 6th of October '20, had some small sparks of action regarding hiring more engineering resources with the engineering lead job post early in '21, but it seems little has happened since - and now we find ourselves here. If we were a tradfi Co - and I don’t think we’re sufficiently different to render this comparison obsolete - the spotlight would be on the product manager and engineering leads to rationalize this. (‘Why was this not foreseen and planned around more?’ ‘How can we learn from this and not make the same errors again?’). We are indeed all in this together, and as has been described, ‘three legs’ of a stoll (Set, DFP, IC community), but at times each leg should be open to direct, respectful and human feedback. The same applies to the IC community where feedback is due from time to time.
In my view, this situation is the largest short-term, strategic threat to the DAO, impacting in a number of ways.
- We’re less able to launch products as fast as we’d like (on an absolute basis and relative vs competitors) to keep trying to win this space (‘speed kills!’)
- Contributors are less able to launch their popular index product ideas within the 18-month Methodologists Reward scheme (mentioned elsewhere by @Thomas_Hepner. And, the 18-month’s timeframe being rather short in nature is even more spotlighted now). This seems inequitable
- External partners are being impacted in a way not forewarned
- Building engineering teams takes a good deal of time in tradfi, let alone DeFi where skills are even more sought after.
While it’s definitely helpful this issue is out in the open, until this issue is resolved it could also affect our ability to encourage talent to move from interested/part-time to full-time/soul invested. It’s affected my motivation. I’m aware and appreciative that Set being involved in IC since the beginning helped jump start things at the beginning (no doubt! - instant protocol to launch on), but the situation now is problematic and seems very foreseeable.
Second, and onto more positive things: how to move forward? This matters more and I think boils down to understanding these items, with crude direction but not perfect precision, and then solving for them.
- How many engineers, with what skill sets, work on IC each month in Set? (Noting your comment @puniaviision to @Matthew_Graham: I wouldn’t want to seek hourly time sheets for engineers (waste of time and would p*ss engineers off), but crude direction as described. From experience in a different market, our engineering teams have broken down into: front end, full stack, back end, infra/devops, info sec, QA, data/quant, HFT, and other, who’s time on various projects and releases various a lot and is communicated via simple Google Sheets documents with GANT-chart-like representations (coloured cells for each resource) to the wider team. Over the last months I’ve heard huge variance regarding what Set’s resources we use: ranging from ‘one engineer week/month’ (seems like a problematically low amount or resource but could be a rumour gone viral) to ‘most of the Set team’s time’. What is the actual resource committed?
- What is the demand profile for these skill sets in an average month or quarter? Ie - steady, surges, product-launch spikes, etc?
- On what timelines can we realistically seek to off-board these skills and value adds from Set to IC engineering? Pros and cons of this approach and other options which we have available. I’m sure short-term, drastic measures bring some potentially undesirable risk and volatility. We’ve seen some communications regarding FLI maintenance and management, as well as rebalancing here (great to see!)
- Are there gates and checkpoints to this process and how they work? Ie - Dylan/other approves first non-Set engineer to release code of ABC types to production. Smart contract code being the highest value and trust level here. How do we rationalize and communicate these gates/checkpoints to the wider community?
- How many engineering resources of which skill sets do we need? Given we’re a DAO, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see a larger group (relative to tradfi) of a mix of full/part-time resources
- What incentives do we need to consider to attract and retain this engineering talent? It seems a more formalized EWG is being planned, but I would be open to a LARGE funding of this WG - knowing that these peoples’ skill sets are valued very highly in the market (more than most peoples’ here!). Mission matters for sure, but when there’s a feeding frenzy for talent, rewards of USD/stables/$INDEX talk loudest.
I would assume there’ll be a post and poll on the more codified formation of this EWG. I’d encourage other Owls to keep their minds open to a potentially large funding cost of this WG given the market for engineers generally and especially for top notch DeFi engineers. Our products are the complete merge of finance and tech - much more so than Blackrock or Vanguard - which brings positives and negatives. Positives: efficiency and scale. Negatives: if we get the ‘tech’ piece wrong, the consequences are even more problematic - potentially devastating. (And I say this as a non-engineer!).
This is shared in the spirit of cooperation but also honesty - I’m amped up because I care and I’m upset - and I hope to see the DAO solve this most critical issue rapidly, to more effectively win this market and deliver potentially life-changing products to our index product investors and value accrual to community members and $INDEX holders. This is a very sub-optimal situation right now, but also an opportunity to right it - and in doing so set ourselves up to realize this much touted ambition to become the ‘decentralized Blackrock’.
How we respond and improve is critical.