Adrian Unger (Info.)

The other day I was walking and chatting with my partner Angela—as we so often do—and realized what made me good at my software development job despite having no formal education: I hate work.

I’ve known from a young age that I didn’t want to work. Office Space felt like movie made for me. I worked at a Sport Chek for 3 months. It felt like hell. My entire being was changed. It was depressive and draining. Pretty dramatic for working at a department store, I know. Yet it’s true.

I tried working more manual labour jobs, outside. Yet, I simply lack the persistent energy required. I lack the necessary physicality.

Reading the above it’s pretty easy to think me defective. Weak in disposition and character. Yet, ironically, I overworked myself during my 15+ year programming career!

I was so motivated by my distaste for working life that I taught myself Photoshop, illustrator, html, css, php, python, ruby, java—I taught myself to create websites, architect the data and back-ends that powered them, how to create mobile apps, and then how to create data warehouses and even how to run some basic statistical analysis.

I was so motivated because I saw if I could at least work from home and not in an office, I’d be able to adapt work to, well, work for me. Later mornings, long breaks, minimal meetings etc.

My aversion to work didn’t just push me into self educating and creating a career in software development—it made me better at it.

I don’t like work. Because of this I always searched out the most efficient way to accomplish the task at hand. I had a natural distaste for “over engineering.” But also knew and detested the need to scrap and rewrite a program in the future because it didn’t scale.

I spent a good deal of my effort finding the balance in the above so I could end up doing the least amount of work. A lot of the time I would work to make myself redundant: I would reduce the complexity of existing systems, “democratize” them so other people could access and leverage them, and reduce the surface area for bugs and issues as much as possible so I didn’t need to maintain them.

In some ways I have a soft spot for programming systems that automate tedious tasks and reduce repetitiveness for humans.

Yet, I’ve now been on sabbatical for more than a year and publicly announced that I’m leaving my software development career. Despite all my effort to avoid work I ended up working a lot. As startups allow more freedoms in some ways, I opted to work at those over more established companies or trying to get hired at Big Tech. I ended up in positions that required a lot of me, nearly all of me.

I lost sight of my original goal, my original motivation: I don’t like work. Ironically, I was so motivated not to get stuck in traditional, conformist work that I overworked myself. I burnt out.

So where do I go from here? Just stay on sabbatical until my savings run out? Hopefully not.

I have the sense I’m not the only one who dislikes work. Perhaps more than ever people are getting fed up with the monotony. That “work” has transformed from craft to cog. From the human scale to whatever scale we’re at today.

More than that I think people are recognizing how they spend their energy matters more than just how much. And perhaps I can help people hone in on that. If this interests you, feel free to reach out.