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I really resonated with this post, I share a lot of its perspectives. And if the author is reading, self-determinism is exceptionally useful when raising childr

I really resonated with this post, I share a lot of its perspectives. And if the author is reading, self-determinism is exceptionally useful when raising children[1]. And if there is anything that my life has taught me, it is that potentially everyone responds differently to the same stimulus. There are few "universal" things about people and so generalizations are difficult if not impossible with regard to how people will react. Understanding that can help avert the 'dual user stories' quagmire that some products find themselves in. Imagine your text editor product development team is half hard-core vim users and half hard-core emacs users. Maybe you put together this team because you wanted a product that appealed to all text editor users, maybe it was just thrown together, however such a team was formed, my experience is that it will produce a substandard product that will not appeal to anyone. This seems to happen because the conflicting visions of "a good editor" within the team seep into the product and the users of the result are often confused as different parts of the same product seem to have different philosophies about how the product should work. That said, I'd love a product like 'Monarch Money' that was a) not subscription based and b) not cloud hosted :-). [1] Anecdotally of course, just a survey of my general social group of which roughly 40% chose to have children and pretty much half took a "self determination" route in child raising and the other half took a "guided/trained" route.

PaulStatezny 6y ago
Regarding [1], would you be willing to expand on what you mean by a "self determinism" versus "guided/trained" parenting approaches? Thanks ahead from one parent to another.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Sure, nothing too deep. With the understanding that this is just peers and acquaintances, not some referred psychology paper or anything. Among my friends, there exists generally two very broad schools of thought with respect to raising children. In one school of thought, which I relate to self determinism and is how I raised my kids, is that as a parent you have no idea what the "best way" is for your kids, they aren't you. As a result, parenting is a process consisting of three things; Teaching your children the underlying reasons and rationale of the world. Sharing with your kids the choices you made, why you made them, and what you learned. And finally, helping them explore different things while giving them a framework for capturing any new learning or understanding that their exploration yielded. The other school of thought, which I think of "You'll do better than me because I'll tell you how to be a better me." is about using your understanding of the world and your experiences in it to create a path for your child that will be more successful (or as successful) as your path. Parenting in that case focuses mostly on setting the direction for your children, giving them goals to help them evaluate how far they have moved along the path, and correcting them when they stray from the chosen path. Both styles fail at the extremes. For self determinism that would be completely disengaged "observer" parents, and for guided path, that would be over functioning "helicopter" parents. Parenting is a big job, but you have to remember that you will be lucky if you to spend a total of five years worth of time being with them[1]. Planned path parenting fails kids who are completely different than their parents (in my experience) and that situation can be expressed by people who graduate from college with a degree in X and then completely change their life after they have run off the end of the list of goals their parents gave them. Anyway, my 0.02 for what it is worth. [1] Assuming at age 18 they go off to college, from about 3 yrs to 5 yrs you get to spend all day with them, then half days, then maybe a quarter day + weekends, and then mostly weekends until they are gone. Chronologically it is nearly 2 decades by in terms of face to face time, especially time where you can talk and really share ideas and thoughts, it is incredibly short.
Ozzie_osman 6y ago
> And if the author is reading Author here, reading, and thanks for this, I really enjoyed your comment. And the 'dual user story' problem (aka split-brain) is so true, I wish someone had told me about it earlier in my career. > That said, I'd love a product like 'Monarch Money' that was a) not subscription based and b) not cloud hosted We chose a subscription-based business model to try and align ourselves with users. If I had to write a second part of my article, I'd write something like "Your product becomes your business model". I've worked on enough "free" products to know that they lead to the very dynamics I criticize in my article (there's another comment in this thread that summarizes that quite nicely[1]). As for not cloud-based, I hope that's something we can deliver some day down the road, but for now, cloud-based products are the easiest way to deliver the type of cross-platform product we're trying to build. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24462452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24462452
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  FWIW, I got to see the 'split brain' product team when Sun Micro decided to do a 386 based workstation and had the east coast team design the system software. Between their Systems Group and the west coast Systems Group much confusion was created. On the product, I'm not interested in a 'free' product, I'd pay you $300 for such a product and buy periodic updates for $100/year. I tend to do this will all 'tools' type applications (Illustration, CAD, Simulation, Etc.) I love having the company invested in making it something wonderful and open source products with their, by necessity, indiscriminate addition of developers, suffer for that reason[1]. My concern, especially with financial software, is that your cloud gets compromised and I and all of your customers are scrambling to avoid losses. Frankly I am amazed that people can get liability insurance for that sort of thing given the stakes! That said, Quicken and Intuit in general, really needs competition to help them focus. Edit: And per the summary comment. I am not suggesting a 'freemium' or ad supported model, just one that keeps the data where I can be assured that if someone else let's their guard down it won't compromise my data. That is the big weakness with 'cloud' in my mind. [1] FreeBSD tries really really hard and comes close, I expect it would really shine if it had a revenue stream to support a full time product management team and lead developers.

PaulStatezny 6y ago

Regarding [1], would you be willing to expand on what you mean by a "self determinism" versus "guided/trained" parenting approaches? Thanks ahead from one parent to another.

ChuckMcM 6y ago
Sure, nothing too deep. With the understanding that this is just peers and acquaintances, not some referred psychology paper or anything. Among my friends, there exists generally two very broad schools of thought with respect to raising children. In one school of thought, which I relate to self determinism and is how I raised my kids, is that as a parent you have no idea what the "best way" is for your kids, they aren't you. As a result, parenting is a process consisting of three things; Teaching your children the underlying reasons and rationale of the world. Sharing with your kids the choices you made, why you made them, and what you learned. And finally, helping them explore different things while giving them a framework for capturing any new learning or understanding that their exploration yielded. The other school of thought, which I think of "You'll do better than me because I'll tell you how to be a better me." is about using your understanding of the world and your experiences in it to create a path for your child that will be more successful (or as successful) as your path. Parenting in that case focuses mostly on setting the direction for your children, giving them goals to help them evaluate how far they have moved along the path, and correcting them when they stray from the chosen path. Both styles fail at the extremes. For self determinism that would be completely disengaged "observer" parents, and for guided path, that would be over functioning "helicopter" parents. Parenting is a big job, but you have to remember that you will be lucky if you to spend a total of five years worth of time being with them[1]. Planned path parenting fails kids who are completely different than their parents (in my experience) and that situation can be expressed by people who graduate from college with a degree in X and then completely change their life after they have run off the end of the list of goals their parents gave them. Anyway, my 0.02 for what it is worth. [1] Assuming at age 18 they go off to college, from about 3 yrs to 5 yrs you get to spend all day with them, then half days, then maybe a quarter day + weekends, and then mostly weekends until they are gone. Chronologically it is nearly 2 decades by in terms of face to face time, especially time where you can talk and really share ideas and thoughts, it is incredibly short.

Ozzie_osman 6y ago

> And if the author is reading Author here, reading, and thanks for this, I really enjoyed your comment. And the 'dual user story' problem (aka split-brain) is so true, I wish someone had told me about it earlier in my career. > That said, I'd love a product like 'Monarch Money' that was a) not subscription based and b) not cloud hosted We chose a subscription-based business model to try and align ourselves with users. If I had to write a second part of my article, I'd write something like "Your product becomes your business model". I've worked on enough "free" products to know that they lead to the very dynamics I criticize in my article (there's another comment in this thread that summarizes that quite nicely[1]). As for not cloud-based, I hope that's something we can deliver some day down the road, but for now, cloud-based products are the easiest way to deliver the type of cross-platform product we're trying to build. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24462452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24462452

ChuckMcM 6y ago
FWIW, I got to see the 'split brain' product team when Sun Micro decided to do a 386 based workstation and had the east coast team design the system software. Between their Systems Group and the west coast Systems Group much confusion was created. On the product, I'm not interested in a 'free' product, I'd pay you $300 for such a product and buy periodic updates for $100/year. I tend to do this will all 'tools' type applications (Illustration, CAD, Simulation, Etc.) I love having the company invested in making it something wonderful and open source products with their, by necessity, indiscriminate addition of developers, suffer for that reason[1]. My concern, especially with financial software, is that your cloud gets compromised and I and all of your customers are scrambling to avoid losses. Frankly I am amazed that people can get liability insurance for that sort of thing given the stakes! That said, Quicken and Intuit in general, really needs competition to help them focus. Edit: And per the summary comment. I am not suggesting a 'freemium' or ad supported model, just one that keeps the data where I can be assured that if someone else let's their guard down it won't compromise my data. That is the big weakness with 'cloud' in my mind. [1] FreeBSD tries really really hard and comes close, I expect it would really shine if it had a revenue stream to support a full time product management team and lead developers.