Silva's Ranting #2 (Patreon)

 It's a tough job being a site owner, you have to balance between the well-being of the translators and the wants of the readers.

Recently, I've been fraught with worries about translators not meeting their deadline and unable to meet the expectations of the readers.

Long story, so bear with me. I'll start by talking about the difficulties I face as the site owner.

To hire a competent translator is really hard, not only do I have to balance quality, but I also have to make sure they are punctual, easy to communicate, and trustworthy. One of the biggest causes for concerns these past few months, aside from bad quality, is punctuality. When the translator don't submit on time and the stock is starting to run low, I start getting anxious and tend to overthink. I'm worried about pissing off the translator, making them demotivated and quit. Since good translators are hard to come by, I don't want to let the good one go, but even to replace the bad ones, I'd first have to find a better one else it's going to be the same cycle all over again. Then, I also have to worry about maintaining our site reputation and meet the reader's expectations.

All these worries are making me lose sleep at times, I keep wracking my brain over how should I break the news to the translators, how I should please the readers, etc. 

I think I've been too lenient to the translators and gave them too much leeway, and the editors would probably agree with me too, but honestly, managing people is hard. I'm always scared if I'm being too strict, the translators would be unhappy and decide to quit, since we're essentially working on a verbal agreement instead of a signed contract, they do have the leeway to stop at any time. And also I have a firm belief that a good working environment leads to better productivity and thus we'll be able to provide better service, but reality doesn't really work like that.

I gave my translators more leeway, the laxer they become and took it for granted, leading to all the worries that troubled me today.

Starting this month, I've already placed a penalty system in place, but I still don't see much of an improvement in their incentive to submit early, so I'm thinking of providing them with a carrot. Maybe that ought to drive their motivation up a bit.

So with that said, I'm thinking of allocating some bonus to translators who submit early and penalty to those who are late.

TLDR; life sucks, being a site owner sucks, the translators also sucks, nothing is going well, kill me now.