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Comment by rblatz | Hacker News Reader

I actually crossed paths early in my career with Steve Burg VP of Engineering at PKSoft and quoted in this story. It was in the early 2000s shortly after Phil’s death. He had taken it very hard and had gotten really into fitness as part of his coping mechanism. Ended up starting a chain of really top of the line gyms in Dayton Ohio. I actually worked out of the back office of one of the gyms for a while working for one of Steve’s buddies.

I wouldn’t characterize Phil as having no friends, at least from the little I knew of Steve.

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His issue wasn’t a lack of friends. His problem, which lead to alcoholism, was explained to me by his former colleagues, primarily Doug Hay. Katz turned to his mother for comfort following Walter’s death. Unfortunately for him and his firm, he received none.

His buy-out of her shares was a poorly communicated effort to remove the business from between them and to attempt to salvage their familial bond. Hildegard instead saw it as a financial assault on herself and resorted to communicating with her own son through lawyers, even after the transaction was completed.

This piece paints her with typical maternal instinct and filial interest despite evidence neither existed once she saw her son’s ability to write, and then subsequently delete, her financial future. Given her reputation was well known I struggle to understand why she was repeatedly given this benefit of the doubt.

> His buy-out of her shares was a poorly communicated effort to remove the business from between them and to attempt to salvage their familial bond. Hildegard instead saw it as a financial assault on herself and resorted to communicating with her own son through lawyers, even after the transaction was completed.

Of course the action did not worked to salvage communication between them? How can one possibly expect better communication after hostile buyout and firing? Whatever her flaws as mother, the subsequent communication only through layers after that seems to me as not just expected, but even reasonable.

I mean, him doing that might have been rational business decision if she was doing job badly, I dont want to judge that. But expecting the relationships to improve after that sounds completely absurd.

It makes complete sense from a programmer's point of view. Refactor the relationship by deleting the troublesome elements, leaving behind what you want to keep.

The programmer and his friends then don't have a ground to complain that the other person in the relationship refactored the rest.

When you approach people as if they were things or code, then those people eventually have only one smart option left - cut you out. It is not because they are evil, but because they are hurt and protecting themselves from further hurt from you. And this approach does guarantee you will hurt them again and again.

So I've been sober for a couple years now and I've met many others in various stages of their own recovery, and what you're describing sounds extremely familiar. Every person's addiction is unique, but self-isolation is a common trait among alcoholics (and probably people with addictions in general).

One of the best exercises we did in recovery was list out as a group what our priorities in life were. It was things like "my partner", "my career", "my health", "finances & having money to live comfortably", "having friends", etc. And when we were done and were happy with our list, the instructor went up and wrote alcohol at the very top. When you're deep in addiction, even if you know it's not rational, even if it's not what you want, the addiction is your top priority. If you have free time, that's how you spend it first; when you have money, it's the first thing you budget for; when you're doing other things, it's what you think about. And for a lot of people, self-isolation makes it that much easier to feed that addiction.

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