That’s on you. You’re free to expect whatever you feel like as long as you don’t hold anyone else accountable.
Others though, trusted the likes of Nick Lambert, and when he said “We are working toward an estimated public launch at the end of 2014”, they expected a public launch at the end of 2014. And we all know how that went.
You see, unlike you, I can’t say I had my own expectations, I have only ever judged the team against their own yardstick. Had they in 2014 said “we need a good few years, maybe more” it would have been a very different story.
Surely, a CEO can have his own ‘personality’. But a certain level of professionality/courtesey has to be there of course
I’m not saying that is a problem here, but I was thinking of Elon Musk, sometimes mentioned on this forum. He wasn’t that professional recently in my opinion. Like the recent insult of a Thailand diver. This was (partly) due to too much work Elon has given himself. And I just read he has to step down as chairman of Tesla (remains CEO however).
Linus Torvalds (not a CEO but comparable) is also trying to change (under pressure?) his ‘management by perkele’-ways, although I think it wasn’t that bad.
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I find this thread disheartening on all fronts. I’m not sure whether the venue for these comments is helping anyone, other than those who wish harm on the project and the team.
Whatever state people perceive the product should be in at this point is largely personal. You are free to buy or sell maidsafecoin to decide how much you believe in the project. No one is locked in and there is no need to poison the well if you have become disillusioned.
For those who have invested more than just supporting the project, I think you have to reflect on those choices. It is great that people want to get behind the project, but sometimes you have to bide your time until it is ready. Making life changing decisions on the back of experimental and incomplete projects is about as risky as it gets; great if you are right, but pretty terrible if you are wrong.
I suspect the team is doing all it can to deliver the network and establish a sustainable business model. It isn’t to their advantage to do otherwise. I feel they need our support, not our criticism.
We all want the network yesterday, but that cannot be. Focusing on how we can help it be ready ASAP is much more constructive.
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Yay in 2018 this still matters. A 100% chance (absolutely true if you’ve followed the project’s details and envisioned/imagined how arduous the coding has been and the sheer people on the idea) to retire if you wait long enough in this project, and also get the most secure global and beyond internet, and some deadline is still being worried about.
…
There’s no need to be cordial about the overall picture && being nice never got anyone anywhere if we’re talking about right vs. wrong. Thus: STFU.
Yeah it’s the faceless internet, where harsh things can be said… should be used to it. And you can continue to do so to me. I mean what argument is your harshness going to have behind it?.. that of still being stuck in 2015? Just responding to your harshness anyway and being more direct about it so, yay, yay humanity.
So, I’ve only skimmed through since I last posted but even as Traktion had even said & it’s as if he makes the most sense with his first sentence. The way I look at this project with community & still will surprisingly is utmost respect. After all, I thought we’re suppose to be here to better the community & the world in a way. I only tuned back into due to the likes & just started scrolling…
I’m just gonna drop this here:
Community Guidelines
Now, I know I derailed this topic in a way but even more so, I’m glad to see it was moved but with everything said in here with relevance to this post! Now, I don’t care if you guys apologize or whatever but even with all of our differences, we still are able to work together. Sure I disagree with BIGbtc due to his viewpoint, I’d still work by him side by side with aspects. But I don’t see that coming up in the near future since I’m not part of the project nor do we chat.
But the reason I say all this, seriously look inside yourselves. Seriously go back through & read this. I’m not saying change anything because I’d prefer if you guys didn’t but reflect & say what can I do better about this. But then again, there are them people that like to see the world burn as well that are part of this community.
Just let Maidsafe do their thing, they have funding and they know what needs to be done. Lets see what they can cook up in whatever time it takes them. As much as its important to have oversight so things don’t run a muck, reading through this thread nothing constructive or beneficial has come from this topic. To the people who want to bash the project or the company running it and how they operate, you don’t have to participate. To Maidsafe itself, you just have to expect thread posts like this to pop up from time to time, you took on a daring project and people are eager for functionality and this is what eagerness mixed with frustration/lack of patience looks like I suppose. But don’t let topics like this distract from goals at hand or change your mood, positive vibes people 
.
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While I don’t want to take sides I do think this topic represents a pinnacle of previous comments and implications of mismanagement. I do realise in the crypto world the level of mismanagement is high and often claims of mismanagement are true. But from my previous experiences with projects, I see SAFE as being within nominal margins expected for a project like this.
Now @BIGbtc, in my opinion this is the pinnacle of a recent set of implications and as such the response to it was in fact the combination of the previous comments.
The obvious implications (really direct, but give you benefit of doubt) are that the management don’t have any sense of urgency and work at a leisurely place and indulge themselves with personal sidetracks in programming (or whatever).
Someone even spring boarded off this accusation to say that the team taking weekends off is not on and should work 7 days a week.
Anyhow having said that I do understand your concerns (more fear I think) of mismanagement as we’ve seen in other projects. They are concerns that should be expressed, but there really is, and I mean really is much better ways to do it.
Now for myself having the luxury of being involved in multi year projects that I can understand from the weekly updates and having met some of the team that this project is not being handled in a lax way at all.
Yea, its way too long IF the project was in late beta or release candidate stage. But we are only at alpha 2 and is not really expected all things to be as one expects off a polished product. Honestly everyone MUST expect things to be hard compared to what they should be in a final product.
As to how long the project is taking then one only has to look at the many examples out there of world changing projects.
- The Gutenberg printing press, basically a type of wine press adapted to printing. Just look how long that took. Just the typeset took over a year. It was a multi year project that seemed to go on and on.
- The internet itself
- The www
- Any mechanical project - car, electric car, radio, rockets, etc etc.
History is littered with examples of multi year projects where the funders gave up on them and alternative funding had to be sought out. Funders pulled out because they got sick of the years passing by with nothing to show for it. And I am sure they were (incorrectly) thinking “have had a paycheck and the luxury of no deadline or performance milestone … That’s a pretty good gig.”
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Solid response @neo … I’m a little concerned that comment was taken completely out of context. I referred to the humor I saw in the “it took me 15 minutes…” (Holy crap, a whole 15 minutes, that long, really??? ) but actually I was recognizing that in fact "when you think something should take 5 seconds, and it takes 15 minutes, that’s a long time. It’s a very effing long time. I know that from my 35+ years in business and in technology.
Do me a favour @neo point out in this thread where I suggest Maidsafe is taking too long. Point out where I complain about no timescales. Show me ANY OTHER POST where I complain about how long this project is taking.
This shitshow has nothing to do with the comment reference to paycheck, timescales or performance. Dig a little deeper. If you can’t see a clear picture of all the influencers - you’re not digging deep enough.
I won’t change how I feel about this project or how I go about making my feelings known. I don’t expect anyone else to change how they go about making their feelings known or how they respond to my commentary.
It’s just how business works. And this is business.
I wish to stay out of this and what I said above is what I think has happened.
No problem. But you did venture into this pigpen with your commentary on.
No problem though.
Things will work out.
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I am kind of surprised at some of the comments here. Maidsafe team has been regularly providing weekly updates, has been steadily growing the team and has defined clear goals from functionality standpoint. I am not a programmer but I know that when you are developing something so unique and transformational, timelines are ‘always expected’. Not guaranteed. As long as the team is making progress and is heading in the right direction,we should just enjoy the ride.
Anyone who is not comfortable with this project - not sure why are they wasting their time on this forum. You could only be upset because you’ve been involved with the project for a long time. If thats the case, I am sure you are also positive on your investment since maidsafe is much higher than where it was in its early years in terms of its valuation. Just take your return and go somewhere else. Let the team focus on their work.
Maidsafe team - please continue with your good work.
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It’s just how business works. And this is business.
Things will work out.
Somebody is raising a pig and loves it? Happy long tail too. Butcher passes by, saying, “Good morning”.
Good morning.
I’ve only been hanging around here for a little over a year, but to me this has always primarily been an “academic research type project”, not a business deal. One that will hopefully change the world. I’m not sure how the project was described in 2014. Maybe somebody could give me some links to the contrary. (Not that it is necessarily even productive or changes anything now.)
This is where BIGbtc went off the rails. The fact that he won’t or can’t recognize that his casual statement about good gigs (or attempt at humor/sarcasm/wit) definitely was or at the very least could have been interpreted to be rather insulting to the core dev team given the hard work, stress, financial and personal cost devoted to this project day and night over the years is irksome. It demonstrates a rather disagreeable personality type or lack of empathy, which is surprising considering the fact that he’s been a member here so long (much longer than me). The other alternative is that he is bored and decided to have some fun as a troll for a few days, which I don’t quite understand. His observation is not accurate, and shows a lack of experience in coding, R&D, or STEM, regardless of how successful he is as an experienced and/or top performing businessman 
(which unfortunately I am not 
). Had he met the core team face to face as neo and others have, I doubt he would have the same perspective he has now.
No, this is obviously much more than just business to a lot of people (including myself). He’s been a long time member, so I’m surprised he can’t see that.
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We will, thanks very much for that :+1.
I should say though, for the sake of this thread, although we have no public deadlines the story in the company itself is very much different. We do analyse work units and move things around to project manage the work. So people may think, oh well then tell us all, but there is a significant difference. If there is slippage, which in an innovative project is almost expected, then we have our internal teams look at that, have several multi party meetings and fix it. So we can internally see if the slippage is avoidable, can other things be parallelised and so on. It is a huge part of work as many of the Engineers will attest.
The amount of time spent in meetings/hangouts is quite considerable and the number of issues discussed and resolved is themselves ominous at times. It would be next to impossible to report all of that publically as it would mean recording every conversation and I doubt in an 8 hour day we would have anything less than 20 or more hours of meeting recordings (I would say 20 is extremely conservative and this number is likely to be significantly higher). This is due to many teams all working together.
So we do have internal deadlines and at times significant pressure to meet those or at least make them less of an issue when we can alter the current task flow to help remove blockages for other teams.
So far from no deadlines or responsibilities, there are in fact many deadlines and many milestones involved in pushing forward. As the teams grow so does the project management tools and project management teams. This is a very large part of the reason you see not so many MaidSafe staff posting publicly here or elsewhere, they are under time pressure to meet the milestones and do so as efficiently as possible.
Therefore the difference between public deadlines and no deadlines is a huge one, easily ignored or obfuscated as in this thread title to make some kind of a cheap point. That does annoy me as the teams are not deadline free and certainly not free of being managed through performance milestones.
I hope this clears up the confusion a bit. I personally get frustrated by the lack of community engagement from the teams at times, but they are frustrated by the deadlines they must meet. This tension really must exist to move forward quickly, which is a shame in many ways, but a necessity in others.
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With a bit of re-write, additions and tweaks, couldn’t this text be used on the new site, under a section “How we work”, subsection "Timelines and milestones " - or something similar?
I’m sure there are plenty of posts like these, where you have addressed various things, which could be almost copy pasted into a section on the site, describing and explaining things that are easily misunderstood from the outside, and are buried in long topics like these.
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Let’s see if @dugcampbell can try something along those lines. It makes sense.
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Sidestepping the drama: Monthly and quarterly updates as a supplement to the weeklies would be much appreciated.
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These are done already.
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I have only known David for 4 years; but in that time he has exemplified the highest degree of honesty and integrity which unfortunately is quite rare today. I invested in the crowd sale and hopefully will be one of the first to farm SafeCoin down the road. The time frame for that road is unknown, as was the time frame for inventing electricity. However, there is no one in the world more suited to the task of completing the mission of MaidSafe. If you doubt this, then you lack the intelligence and common sense necessary to evaluate the question.
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