Redefining Ambition After Burnout | Zapier’s Kelly Vaughn

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:09)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:11)
In this week's news roundup, we're talking about how the work culture in big tech is shifting away from cushy benefits and into survival mode. And we're also talking about why outdated technology is at the heart of problems at Newark Airport, and how AI is now transforming Washington. What do you want to dig into first, Ben?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:31)
Well, as somebody who always dreamed of having a big, cushy job, but for some reason has never had one, I want to talk about that one, but maybe we can talk about the FAA first and what's happening there, because that seems to be a lot more top of mind for people right now.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:45)
Yeah, you bet. So this has been an interesting one. If you've been paying attention to the news recently, there's been a lot of problems happening at Newark Airport with radar outages, technology problems. And we're talking about an airport, right? Planes with people going in and out of the sky at a time when there's already a lot of anxiety around flying just because of recent snafus with planes all across the world, but especially here in American airports. And so at its core, this is a story about the FAA having to re-approach their technology with some rather unorthodox solutions. Some of them which include buying parts off of eBay because the equipment they have on hand is so old and the stuff they have to replace it with is that difficult to source. I don't think this comes as a shock to anybody. Legacy systems are all across the government in all parts of the things that power are every day. They're written in ancient languages like Cobol that only people over the age of 60 even know. And it really kind of sets us up for, we have these like brittle systems or at least outdated systems, systems that ran on technology of yesterday. But as we know, today's technology world is moving so fast. So you can imagine how much quicker these things are becoming antiquated.
This is a high-stakes situation because we're talking about planes that go in and out of the sky. No one wants to be on a plane wondering if the Cobol programming, powering the radar at their air traffic control tower, their airport is going to work that day. But ultimately these things are strapped under bureaucracy. This isn't a surprise to anybody that at its core, it's a human problem. So Ben, what do you think about the story?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (2:23)
You know, we take a lot of technology for granted, especially like stuff like flying in an airplane, which has become so commonplace in such a norm. In fact, I mean, I was even on a plane just last week to go to the Code Remix Summit and I was thinking about this story the entire time as I was getting on and off airplanes. You know, I was very conscious of like, for probably the first time in a while with flying, I was very conscious of like all of the little things that went into making sure that me and everyone else get safely from one place to another. And it kind of puts things in a perspective when like there are delays and people get frustrated and like upset with the airline and all of that stuff. But, you know, that's just a fact of having like these high stakes environments. Yeah. But speaking of Code Remix, you know, one of the things that came up in discussion a lot there was how like software engineering as a whole really is in its infancy compared to most other engineering professions. Think about how long architecture as a practice has been around. So like at least hundreds of years and maybe even orically thousands of years. Like I'm not an expert on this, but, you know, people have been building stuff for a long time.

**Andrew Zigler** (3:31)
The Romans would have something to say, Ben.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:33)
Yeah, right. So and the issue I think is that the software industry is now dealing with this complex reality of legacy systems that are well beyond their end of life. In an industry that is relatively new on the grand time scale of humanity. And then on top of things, it's like rapidly being disrupted by AI. Like at Code Remix, you know, one of the biggest topics was ad modernization. And I actually learned a few things on this topic. And a big takeaway was that when you're migrating from these legacy systems, there's this like complex interaction of these like deterministic and probabilistic systems that can be really hard to unwire sometimes. So like for flights, like on the deterministic side, you know, you got to track the data and the location for all of these planes in real time to avoid collisions, right? Like either things are colliding or they're not colliding. Like there's only two situations there. But then there's also all these probabilistic elements like weather and schedule changes. Like you have to proactively and reactively adapt to dynamic environments. And, you know, a lot of the challenges that modernization faces is largely deterministic. This was a sentiment that was echoed by a recent guest, Anamash Mishra from DiffBlue, which was also like to bring this full circle. They were also a CodeRemix sponsor, which is really cool to see their tech partnership. But, you know, air traffic control is dealing with all of these typical software issues, but then this whole layer of added complexity of both federal regulations and outdated infrastructure that we need coordinated investment into this.