"As somebody who, as a trained therapist, I'm very familiar with the signs of burnout, and yet I fell victim to it myself. And it also goes to show that even therapists need therapists because we all need that third party to remind us what's going on."

What happens when the person trained to spot burnout becomes its next victim?

Kelly Vaughn is a Senior Engineering Manager at Zapier, the author of the After Burnout Substack, and a trained therapist. She joins hosts Ben and Andrew to share her incredibly candid journey of discovering burnout in herself. Kelly reveals how she (despite her professional understanding of burnout's mechanisms) found herself deep in its grip, recounting the slow realizations like dwindling passion, increasing cynicism, and distinct physical tolls like disrupted sleep and a loss of hunger cues.

This raw conversation offers vital lessons for anyone in a high-pressure career (and let’s face it: that’s all of us!). As the tech landscape accelerates with AI, Kelly shares insights on managing its pressures and opportunities. She redefines ambitions for herself alongside the non-negotiables she established for her own well-being when seeking her new role. Listeners will gain powerful insights into identifying their own limits, the courage for pivotal changes, and integrating new demands without self-sacrifice.

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Transcript

Andrew Zigler: 0:06

Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 0:09

And I am 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. we're also talking about why outdated technology is at the heart of problems at Newark Airport and how AI is now transforming Washington.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 wanna 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 I, I want to talk about that one. But maybe we can talk about the, the FAA first and what's happening there.'cause 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, the, 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, reapproach 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 stake situation because we're talking about planes that go in and outta the sky. No one wants to be on a plane wondering if the COBOL programming powering the radar at their air traffic control tower at their airport is gonna 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, a, a human problem. So, Ben, what do you think about the story?

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 2:23

Yeah. You know, we, we take a lot of technology for granted, especially like stuff like flying in an airplane, which has become so commonplace and 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 that me and everyone else gets safely from one place to another. and it kind of puts things into 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.

Andrew Zigler: 3:08

Yeah.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 3:09

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 like at least hundreds of years and maybe even arguably 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 then.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 3:33

Yeah. Right. so, and, and the, 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, the grand timescale of, 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 app modernization and I, I actually learned a few things on this topic, and a big takeaway was that, you know, when you're migrating from these legacy systems, there's this like complex interaction of these like deterministic and probabilistic systems that. It can be really hard to unwire sometimes. So like for flights, like on the, the deterministic side, you know, you gotta track the data and the location for all these planes in real time to avoid collisions, right? Like either things are colliding or they're not colliding. Like there's only two, 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, to dynamic environments. And you know, a lot of the challenges that modernization faces is largely deterministic. this was a, a, um, a sentiment that was echoed by a recent guest, Animesh Mishra from Diffblue, which was also like to bring this full circle. They were also a code remix 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. So let's, let's keep this, technology in the federal US federal government train going, Andrew, what, what's our next story?

Andrew Zigler: 5:18

So, we're talking about how, this isn't news to anybody, how technology and, and such as being overthrown, in the US government, and this has to go back obviously to the core of DOGE and, and its mandate or its goals to, overhaul technology within the government and agencies are now putting in place top-down AI initiatives to achieve those goals. And if you work in software engineering like many of our listeners do, this probably sounds really familiar. We're all in this environment where we get these top-down AI initiatives,

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 5:49

Yeah.

Andrew Zigler: 5:49

Now, when we're talking about. the government trying to overhaul traditional programs with ai, we're talking mostly about, replacing bureaucratic workers, middle management workers, we might think of at the IRS or otherwise with a automated systems powered by AI Now. This is obviously a very, um, a, a appealing thing for many to explore, just like how it is in software engineering, because when you have a hammer like ai, everything kind of does start to look like a nail. You want to try to take it and apply it to all sorts of new problems. So in a world where, uh, or either in a place like, you know, government where you have a lot of antiquated and, uh, legacy problems, it's really appealing to try to take this new tech to it. But it obviously is a highly nuanced issue because again, the stakes are so high. We're talking about systems that power our world, that allow people to get access to healthcare, to benefits, to money that they're entitled to from various programs, things that actually might keep people alive in many circumstances. So the stakes for, uh, implementing this are way, way, way higher than most of us ever deal with in software engineering. Something that this story reminded me of, of coming in and trying to replace people in old systems with ai. It reminded me of like the, the Klarna ai, um, memo that, that that was, came out in recent weeks, recent months about, replacing customer service representatives with ai. And in like the past week or so, they've quietly been putting back up job postings for customer service reps and walking back those statements about replacing people with ai. And it goes to show that, Klarna might have learned something in that process that you can't fully replace those systems with something like AI technology. Um, that sometimes problems do ultimately need to be handled by people. Just maybe the skills that the people are using are evolving. So. This is a highly nuanced issue, and it's not news to anybody, uh, but it is kind of a, a new development in terms of putting top-down AI initiatives in

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 7:46

Yeah, so I think, yeah, the big story here is that, you know, these top down AI initiatives appear to be coming for the government as well. Both in Doge, but also the IRS. I totally get the desire to like, apply AI to a bunch of situations, like, particularly at the IRSI could see why they would want to do this, but, uh, neither one of these organizations is being very transparent about how they're applying it. And my concern is that there's, there's a right way to do it and there's a wrong way. Like the right way is to use it for these probabilistic challenges, like I mentioned earlier. So like for example, the IRS might want to use AI to like feed it some, some filtered data sets, uh, and then use AI to like predict unusual or suspicious behaviors like probabilistic detection. Like that is generally, a good application for ai. But then there's also the wrong way when you try to like apply it to like deterministic challenges. Like I don't want AI trying to determine how much I owe for taxes every year. And I don't think anyone listening to this would want that either. So, you know, I hope more of the former is happening rather than the latter. But I think when you really think about it, like there's a deeper story here that ties both the last story and this story together in that there really is just a lot of software infrastructure that is aging. Particularly like I imagine the US federal government is not the only government in the world that's facing this. but it is, does seem particularly acute within the United States. and we're just lacking like coordinated modernization programs. Like,

Andrew Zigler: 9:16

Yeah.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 9:16

know, I, I'm, I'm thinking back to like, we had the, civilian Conservation Corps back during the depression where, you had young people that would get paid and they would have housing just to go out and build things for the public. when I found out about this, I was hiking in, in a state park and stopped in a shelter and like read this plaque that explained that people that were there a hundred years before me built this thing so that I could enjoy it. almost a hundred years later. And we don't really have very many practices like that today, particularly not for software. Like, you know, there's no like AmeriCorps for software that I'm aware of at least. And I would fully support like some sort of initiative to, to do things like that, to help our government and our public sector, like modernize. And you know, the truth is there's just so many opportunities out there. Like there's more opportunities than there are people like solving those, those challenges today. And you know, I'm, I'm aware that like, you know, this has been a little US heavy so far. Like we have a lot of listeners that aren't in the US. And I imagine some of those governments have really figured out how to modernize technology versus like, there's probably plenty of others that also have not. if you've seen really cool things where you live, like we would love to hear about it. Like, come share it with us on Substack. Like, if you're hearing this podcast, there's already a newsletter out for this today. Go out there and comment on it and share some interesting stories about what your government is doing to handle this modernization problem.

Andrew Zigler: 10:37

Yeah, really great coverage and I completely agree. And Ben, do you wanna tell us a little bit more about our last news story of the day, talking about layoffs that have hit Microsoft?

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 10:47

Yeah. Yet another week, yet another round of layoffs. I mean, it just feels to me like this is Microsoft announcing just their annual layoffs. this year it was 3% of the workforce. I think that was somewhere around six or 7,000 people. again, it looks like the typical big tech layoff, not really based on like performance or like strategic value. It just kind of hits across the board. it's basically just a, a ham fisted, cut across everything. Like at least that's the way it looks to me on the outside. I'm not saying that's exactly what it is. you know, of course I empathize like it, it really sucks to be one of those workers that wakes up one day and finds out that your, your job doesn't exist. And it's kind of the become this, this unfortunate reality of working in big technology. But we're also seeing other companies like, not necessarily layoff right now, but like Amazon just announced some new pay structure that. the way they try to position is that it will consistently favor high performing employees at the expense of what they designate as low performing employees. Uh, and of course, if you know anything about Amazon, they have a very, they have a habit of like, effectively stack ranking a lot of their employees. Um, I don't know if it's, strict stack ranking, but it certainly looks a lot, a lot like it. But I kind of get the sense that big tech is losing their luster. Like what do you think about that, Andrew?

Andrew Zigler: 12:06

I think that the perception of these like cushy tech jobs with the benefits has definitely been eroded, since the pandemic, maybe even a little bit before.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 12:14

Yeah,

Andrew Zigler: 12:15

there was a time maybe

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 12:17

I.

Andrew Zigler: 12:17

like a decade ago where those jobs were seen as places where you could build that expertise and get paid really well and work in a. Big office with lots of benefits and just have, may, maybe you don't have that work life balance that other industries do, but because you were showered in all of these amazing benefits that other industries. Did not have, it became a unique haven where people really strived to kind of achieve it. But

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 12:40

Yeah.

Andrew Zigler: 12:41

the wake of all of these layoffs and return the office mandates, which are kind of like soft layoffs and, and everything in between, along with of course the pandemic, the shuttering of a lot of those offices, the, the closing of a lot of like the food catering and like the free drinks or whatever the case, like all of those shiny things that made tech so cool to race to, to try to be in these big, companies like a fang or something they kind of eroded. And what, what's happened is in that decade, you know, time, doesn't time doesn't stop. So you have new folks entering the workforce. You have Gen Z now entering the workforce, and they have an entirely different perception about careers and traditional jobs than other generations do. you know, this new wave of Gen Z workers, they don't see traditional careers in tech as those safe havens, and they don't see it as a safe bet for their skills or their career. In fact, the best thing that they think they can do for themselves, which I agree, is to build their own expertise and their own brand, because you can never lay yourself off. And so. I think that that is like an ultimately a mindset shift for how people are entering the tech world, and it's something that leaders need to consider when they think about their job postings or going out there and trying to bring in new folks that there's not this defacto Oh, cool. It's software engineering appeal to it anymore. and especially if you're in an environment where layoffs are frequent or possible, there are anxieties. involved with that too, that are important to address. Don't just let it be this elephant in the room that no one talks about.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 14:10

Yeah, you made a good point about these traditionally being viewed as like A career builder, a resume builder, and I wonder if the fact that they've had more than a decade at this point of that sort of status, if maybe they've attracted like the wrong types of people, like people who aren't there because they want to work at Microsoft or at at Amazon or Google, but people that just wanna work there so that they can get to the next. Gig that will pay them more, give them more recognition or, or whatever have you. But I also feel like we're in a period where I. and this comes in cycles, but right now we're going through a period of everyone being focused heavily on efficiency rather than like trying to grow. Like it's, it's growth through efficiency rather than just growing through growth, you know?

Andrew Zigler: 14:53

right.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 14:53

and I wonder how much of this also is like. Just the writing on the wall, that that like AI driven teams are going to scale at a much faster rate than human driven teams. Like if you're relying on increasing human head count to to scale, like that's not nearly as, it's not gonna be nearly as impactful as teams that can use AI to scale their efforts. You know, small teams have always had this advantage of being more nimble than the large corporations, but they've never had the advantage of being able to move faster than the big companies. And AI is kind of leveling the playing field on that to some extent. we've already seen how some companies are refusing to hire new roles. if it's a job that could be automated through ai. and maybe I'm just biased 'cause,'cause I work for a small company, but it, it really does feel like small companies have the biggest potential for growth in the AI era. And maybe we're seeing big tech respond to that by trying to make their teams smaller and more nimble.

Andrew Zigler: 15:49

Yeah, I agree.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 15:51

So Andrew, who's our guest today.

Andrew Zigler: 15:53

Yeah, in just a moment. Ben and I both are sitting down with Kelly Vaughn of Zapier and we're talking about life after burnout and putting the breaks on ambition. You don't wanna miss this one.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 16:05

Are your code reviews slowing you down? With LinearB automations, you can transform the way Engineering teams review code with automatic AI powered PR descriptions and code reviews. Your developers get instant feedback on every poll request. Combine that with smart AI orchestration and you can cut the noise and boost your productivity. LinearB AI flags bugs, suggests improvements, and keeps your team focused on what really matters building great software. What's really cool is LinearB outperformed GitHub copilot in a recent head-to-head With ikea's software engineering team, LinearB provides better context to where reviews with more robust orchestration. Head over to LinearB.io to learn more about incorporating AI into your code reviews. So we're back at Dev Interrupted with a veteran, Kelly Vaughn, senior engineering manager at Zapier, and author of the Modern Leader and after burnout newsletters. Kelly, it's been such a long time. Welcome back to the show.

Kelly Vaughn: 17:03

Thank you so much, and I'm going to start you off with a little lesson.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 17:08

Oh.

Kelly Vaughn: 17:08

pronunciation of the company is Zapier, and you can always remember. Remember that Zapier makes you happier.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 17:14

Wow. Calling me out right at the start of the episode.

Kelly Vaughn: 17:17

This is a new title. Every time I've been on here, I, I had my director of engineering title at Spot AI, so this is all new. I had to squeeze that one in there.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 17:25

All right, well, we'll, I'll do my best to get it right the rest of the show. I can't make promises. So, yeah. So, well, to kick things off, like formally, I wanna congratulate you for this new position. Andrew and I are both big fans of the company. We've both used it for quite a while. Uh, sounds like you have as well. So that, that's pretty awesome. And we will maybe dive a little bit into your work. but first, if you've been following the show for a few years, you might remember that Kelly is a trained therapist and because of this background, we've always appreciated your insight on the more human aspects of engineering. And in fact, your episode from 2022, which was titled Treating Devs like Human Beings, is actually one of our most popular episodes of all time. So it's clearly a subject that our audience like really cares about.

Andrew Zigler: 18:06

And is popular for a reason. You know, topics like burnout, which is what we're gonna cover today. They've always resonated really deeply with a Dev Interrupted audience. But what makes today's conversation a little different is that it's not about recognizing burnout on your team or in someone that you manage and that capacity, but it's about recognizing burnout in yourself and seeing burnout when you look in the mirror ultimately. And Kelly, you wrote about this in a blog post. Uh, about burnout and leaving your previous job, and it's an incredibly candid post. We definitely encourage those listening to go check it out. We're gonna have links to it and we'll be discussing it today. And we wanted to have you on the show to, see what would motivate you to be so open and candid about this experience and what we can all learn from it. and allows us to ask a broader question, you know, and, and the excitement in the, in the hype around ai. Are we forgetting to address fundamental age old human challenges? Within our teams and cultures, AKA, are we moving so fast? We're forgetting the basics.

Kelly Vaughn: 19:04

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm excited to talk about this because as you said, we had a conversation about it back in 2022, and as somebody who, as a trained therapist, I'm very familiar with the signs of burnout, and yet. I fell victim to it myself. And it also goes to show that even therapists need therapists because we all need that third party to remind us what's going on. So yeah, I'm, I'm super excited to dig into this with you.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 19:30

one thing I wanted to kick off with is, you shared a quote about millennials who are climbing the corporate ladder in their twenties only to start climbing back down for various reason in their thirties. So, how does this reflect the pressures that you've observed or even experienced within the engineering world? And, you know, particularly, I think you might have some, some things to say around this, 10x engineer, like ideal statement that we have out there.

Kelly Vaughn: 19:53

Yeah, I love this quote. it forever will live rent free in my head at this point just because it's, it's very much where I'm at. You know, when you're in your twenties, you're promised all these great things. If you, if you work really hard, we can go into a whole nother episode on all the millennial promises that we've been made. but, you know, you, you work really hard to. progress in your career and we grew up and air quoting grew up there at a time when the market was responding. So, positively to us getting into engineering and the venture money that was available. a ton of companies were hiring really fast, which means people were moving up really quickly and you saw all these opportunities to, you know. Continue to grow in your own career, and as you continue to move up, you kind of lose sight of where you came from because you're moving so incredibly quickly on this train that you really need to hop off at some point. We don't take enough time to reflect on where we've been and how we got to where we are today, and we often equate a lot of these things to skill. You know that I am very good at my job and therefore I'm earning these, these promotions and pay raises and larger scopes of work. And in a way that is true, but there's also a lot of luck that got us to where we are today as well. And so. You know, now that we're in our thirties and you know, of the varying range for, for millennials, we've hit this wall starting with the pandemic and we're starting to see a very different world in engineering where we've been moving at lightning speed. Speed this entire time while the con, you know, the world continues to move rapidly, especially in this age of ai, that we feel the need to keep up this pace that is just impossible to do. We want to run, we want to run really fast and continue to run forever. And it's just your, you can only handle so much of that. I am, picking back up on running after an injury that I had last year, and I, I have to start trading for, I'm choosing to, start trading for my first marathon. I'm running Detroit this year and I've run half marathons before, but because of this, this injury, I'm basically starting from zero again, or it feels like I'm starting from zero. So you have to intentionally slow down in order to speed back up again. And we are now moving into this phase where we are also having to intentionally slow down. Remember who we are as a company or who we are as engineers and figure out, you know, what is actually gonna get us to where we want to be and what do we want to do as well.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 22:18

Yeah, it's actually reminds me of, one of my favorite songs from The White Stripes. Just a random shout out. But, it's about how we all get started out in little rooms, with few resources. Not a lot. available to us and it's really just us with our own capabilities and, you know, as you level up, you get bigger and bigger rooms with more resources and more capabilities, and it can be really helpful to just stop for a moment and think like, how did I get started in that little room? And like, what can I learn to apply to today?

Kelly Vaughn: 22:45

Yeah, and it's not only like, how did I get started, but am I, is what I'm doing today what I want to be doing? Because you know, you blink and suddenly you're taking on more responsibility that you never really wanted. That feels almost like a left turn from your original career. And in some cases that's fine. People change careers all the time, but you do need to sit down and reflect, is this actually what you want to do? by the time I left Spot, I was overseeing. engineering for our video management system product. I was overseeing product for that same product. I was also our head of IT and I was also overseeing security in GRC doing all of our SOC two and HIPAA audits, all of our security reviews for enterprise customers. I was going on site with customers to close deals and. When I started as a director of engineering, obviously this is a lot broader scope. This is four different jobs in one, and so that is really what gave me pause and like, am I actually doing what it, like what do I want to do with my life? Who do I want to be when I grow up? Because I don't think it's four people.

Andrew Zigler: 23:43

It hits a certain part, especially when you start growing in skills and responsibilities and as you're saying, like you're moving faster and faster, taking advantage of like this Lightspeed opportunity in front of you, you'd be silly not to jump into that jet stream and just kind of see where it could take you. But the further you go down that, and the more you accumulate in terms of experiences and responsibilities, the more doors. That actually close on you, and that if those doors are closing in those doors or doors that you wanted to go through, then now you're having to shift course. And it's because of just the things that you're doing, not because of the aspirations that you've set. And this is how I think folks get on these like, in a, in a train mindset of like, I'm going as fast as I can. I'm accumulating all of these experiences. I'm gonna build, build, build, and do all these things. And then before you know, it, just like you described, you're doing like four jobs. Like I relate with that. So much. Like I, I've had a job I've done before where you start doing one thing really well and then everyone recognizes and sees how good you are at that one thing. They must be good at a lot of other things, right? And then you

Kelly Vaughn: 24:41

Yep.

Andrew Zigler: 24:41

getting more responsibilities and you're like, oh, this is great. I'm gonna cut my teeth on this and on this, I'm gonna know how to do this. and a lot of times it's so great, it gets you way ahead of other people, but for yourself, it closes doors on maybe things you would've rather been spending your time on

Kelly Vaughn: 24:55

exactly. And, and to add onto that, I think we fear those closing doors. Every time we say yes to something, we're saying no to many other things because you can only take on so much.

Andrew Zigler: 25:07

yeah.

Kelly Vaughn: 25:07

we fear what. Those nos are, or what those nos could have been. And we get so single track on what we're thinking about and where we want to go, yet we're always thinking about what we're missing out on. and this is why, you know, taking that moment to pause and sit back for a second allows you to reflect on which doors have closed, which doors do I wish had opened in the past that I could have gone through, and which ones am I grateful that I did go down, you know, like, I'm a recovering entrepreneur. As I say, I have a lot of experience running companies. I am now working for somebody else's company, and while I don't have aspirations to start my own company anytime soon, it's possible that it might in the future. There is so much I learned from that journey that I take into my everyday work working for somebody else, and that is a huge value add for me as an employee as well, to really understand the business and customer side of things, even if it's not a core part of my job today.

Andrew Zigler: 26:05

I wanna ask too, in that environment where you, you know, Ben defined about like the 10x engineering culture, in that environment, there's a lot of external and internal pressures. You and I have talked a bit about now about like those internal pressures of like, I'm gonna go as fast as I can, but zooming in on those external pressure pressures, those things that happen in our environment, in the organization that we're in, you know, what kind of demands or norms around this 10x engineer culture drives towards that burnout that you saw in yourself and that others' experience. I.

Kelly Vaughn: 26:34

think what we're seeing today with AI is a massive, massive example of this. I saw it at my previous company. I can see it in my current company. And it's not a flaw necessarily, but it's just, you know, it's part of the hype train. there are so many really cool things that we can do with ai. It is still nascent all things considered. You know, when you look back at how long HTML has been a thing, and we're learning so much as we go, but it also means that if you're not continuously learning, you're falling behind. And it's easy to fall into that trap to say, well, I have to learn everything available to me, and I have to keep up with whatever, is trending in the market. You know, understanding MCP, for example. What in the world is that? Do I need to learn this? Is this actually beneficial for me? I think it's pretty cool personally. and Zapier's, MCP little plug there is also really cool that we have something actually official at the company as well. but these kinds of things can fall into a trap. And, and you can also see it, when you're looking from the outside looking in, this can affect your own job. Because you can feel like you're suddenly having to pivot again and again and again. Like what is actually on the roadmap? What is gonna be most important to our customers? What are customers asking for? And customers, especially your early adopters, they're always gonna be like, oh, well I heard about this. Are you doing anything with this? And somebody might be like, oh yes, we absolutely are. When we had absolutely no plans to do that, and suddenly. You are having to adapt your work and you can leverage AI for your day to day. And I highly encourage everybody to find ways to leverage AI for your day to day. But when it becomes all encompassing as like this is now your culture as a company, it can feel like you are moving at a 10x pace and you need that time to slow down because I think we've all experienced that, the faster you move with whatever you're building, especially on the engineering side of things, you start to have to make intentional trade-offs, and typically the first thing to go is test coverage. I've seen this again and again and again, And so if you are trying to build a product that is supposed to continuously support a large number of customers, and you're starting to reduce test coverage in favor of building faster, you're going to start to feel the ripple effects of that. And it is very demoralizing as an engineering team to constantly hear about the complaints of, this doesn't work and this doesn't work, and this is broken, and this looks kind of funny. When are you gonna spend time working on this? When you're getting a lot of top-down pressure to continue to build the next thing, and that is how people end up burning out.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 29:04

whenever I unlock like a new workflow with ai, like, you know, I'm guilty of this, the first thing that comes to mind is like, how can I now move as quickly as possible with this workflow that I've unlocked? And you know, the problem is that if you're going in the wrong direction, all you're doing is bad things, even faster than you've ever been capable

Kelly Vaughn: 29:20

Yes, exactly.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 29:23

but, and I also think it's really helpful when you can. you know, as somebody who kind of views myself, and I think Andrew's kind of in the same boat, and maybe you are as well, Kelly, but I, I view myself as someone who's kind of on the, ahead of the curve on AI adoption. Like I've really embraced it in a lot of different ways. I also find it's really helpful to share learnings with other people because, it helps you put yourself relatively speaking where you are. In, like, you know, everyone's trying to stay ahead and learn the next greatest thing. it helps you understand, relatively speaking, where you are compared to everyone else because the reality is that the vast majority of the world is still extremely early to this stuff. So like you might feel this pressure, like maybe you're a high performer that feels this pressure to work as quickly as possible using AI because you think someone else is gonna catch up to you if you don't. But the reality might be that you're actually like doing extremely well and it's like just, keep. the course and maintain quality and keep doing the right thing and just gradually augment your workflows.

Kelly Vaughn: 30:21

Exactly if you try to completely revamp your entire workflow. This goes for any building, any habit. Honestly, if you try. To change too much at once, it's not going to be sustainable. Try something. See if it's actually helpful for you. Run a tiny experiment on that and if it doesn't work, then pivot. If it works, then great, you can now try something new. But if you try to keep up with everybody else or choose like one specific person that you're like. Air quotes competing with, to know as much as they know when you don't know why they're learning or how much time they're able to dedicate towards learning or how it affects their life, their career, their job. You know, you're not going to be on the same footing. There's always going to be differences there. If I were to, poll my, group of friends and ask them how they're using AI in their day to day, they'll be like, I'm not, or maybe they're like, oh yeah, I occasionally chat with ChatGPT and like, that's the extent of it. Like this. It's all relative.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 31:16

I had to help me plan on my trip to France. Right.

Kelly Vaughn: 31:18

Oh man. It actually used it for our last trip to France when we went to Leon and it planned some fantastic like side trips for us to, the, the home of Michelin, for example. It found an amazing restaurant that I swear is going to be a Michelin guide restaurant or a Michelin starred restaurant at some point. Yeah, I mean, ChatGPT's great for travel.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 31:40

let's, double down on this AI stuff because I, I mean, if you're a list regular listener of this show, you know, practically every week at this point we're talking about it.'cause it seems to be impacting all facets of software development. let's think specifically like, as teams are adopting AI. you know, I think the people who are probably gonna be under a lot of pressure in this environment are like your high performers within your organization. what are some of the, traditional signs of burnout that managers should be on the lookout for? And how do you think ai like, impacts that?

Kelly Vaughn: 32:12

I look for slip in quality of work. First off, like what's going on so we can have a conversation. I look for behaviors like how are you showing up to meetings? Are you showing up to meetings? How has your communication style changed If people start to become a little bit more cynical, that is usually a cue to me that they might, I, you know, I. Appreciate skepticism. being cynical is a, taking it to a whole different level. And when they start to cross over that, that line in into cynicism, that's when I'm like, okay, something's going on here. and you know, I will ask them like, what has changed recently? Your workflows, your workload? How are you actually, completing your work these days? I've noticed some people who were early adopters of using Cursor for example, their code quality actually decreased because they felt that they had to move so fast that they were becoming wholly reliant on it, and they were shipping less than stellar quality of code. And it happens sometimes. When you

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 33:09

mentioned the slip in quality, I was like, doesn't that just naturally happen when you adopt ai?

Kelly Vaughn: 33:14

It. That's where the skepticism is important. Like it's going to help me, but how well will it help me?

Andrew Zigler: 33:21

so then obviously you're incentivized by these tools and these environments to move really fast. Sometimes in some cases ship less than stellar stuff. I think that's the pressure. A lot of engineers, especially those that pursue excellence are feeling right now, they want to, you know, hold onto their process because their process delivers really excellent results that frankly go above what. AI can typically deliver if they're highly specialized or have a lot of domain knowledge. And so is there advice that you would give like a leader or a team about creating this environment where, people are all on the same team and aligned about how they're gonna be using the tools, but also those holdouts are kind of getting educated about like, this is what I need to do to level up my workflow so it works for me without burning everybody out, you

Kelly Vaughn: 34:07

Yeah. Yeah. I think if there is a, if there's pressure from the business to adopt AI in your everyday, that needs to be made clear, first and foremost from a leadership perspective and, and how you. want your team to adopt ai, I think it's also really beneficial for you to all sit down and just knowledge share of how you're leveraging ai. And it doesn't necessarily just have to be on your team, especially if it's like a company directive. Make this an open channel of communication because whatever you are doing with AI and engineering, somebody from support or somebody from sales will be able to get an idea from that. And apply that to their own day to day. So the more that you can discuss it, the more you're creating an open forum of what works and what doesn't. And it'll also help bring along those who don't have that same level of trust in AI who are used to that very high level of excellence, for example, that they're like, well, I can do this better on my own. If you have some other high performer saying, Hey, I am also very much on the same, same boat as you. However, here is how I'm using AI to help augment what I'm doing where I still feel like I am in control of my destiny. And then you can, you can kind of create some like mentorship and some coaching opportunities in there to bring everybody along. I would also get a pulse check on how the company or your team is feeling about adopting AI as well. And just do that regularly, like every two weeks or so, especially at the rate, AI is moving. Like, what cool thing did you learn about ai? How are you feeling about adding AI into your workflows For this particular reason? And you can also kind of see, and I'm sure if we were to look back at the past two, three months of AI adoption within an organization, you'll see more and more and more folks finding opportunities to adopt AI beyond just like asking chat GPT questions.

Andrew Zigler: 35:47

Yeah, absolutely.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 35:48

and I love your, your idea of cross pollinating, even outside of engineering.'cause I mean, we are really at a, state right now where we're all fundamentally learning. basic capabilities, like in the long term, like we'll look back on now and look at what we're learning as a pretty basic fundamental capability of using ai. Like there's gonna be so much more down the road

Kelly Vaughn: 36:08

Exactly, and I love AI agents because they're leveling the playing field in a way, because you don't have to be a developer to get the full extent out of ai. And I have never seen in my entire professional career something so substantial in this market where. Somebody in sales who is non-technical can take just as much advantage of AI as I can. Now, you know, building your own mc, uh, MCP server might be a whole different conversation. That is still a fairly technical thing, but you're still able to take a lot of advantage through, the open network that Claude has created, for example, that they recently launched. And you don't have to know how to code to do any of this.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 36:52

Yeah, actually Andrew and I have been talking about this concept of disposable code more

Andrew Zigler: 36:56

Yep.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 36:57

Like non-technical people particularly would never think to solve their problems with code in the past. But today, it actually does make a lot more sense to maybe ask. ChatGPT to write some python to

Kelly Vaughn: 37:09

Exactly.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 37:10

and then just run it. You know, you don't, you're not deploying it to production. You just need to solve a problem,

Kelly Vaughn: 37:15

Yeah, it is. It is making rapid prototyping truly rapid. And I love that. So long as you don't take that prototype and immediately ship it to production, because

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 37:23

Yeah.

Kelly Vaughn: 37:23

that is where we start to get issues.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 37:25

user information and financial, yeah.

Andrew Zigler: 37:27

You know, in, in, in this conversation, we can kind of divide it almost into like a hero's journey. Like we talked a bit in, in the beginning about being in this lightning fast culture and learning fast and moving quick, and then climbing up a career ladder and ultimately. Burning out, right? But now we're in that part of the journey where you're after the burnout, you've had all the benefit of being able to reflect back on that experience, understand how that happened to you, someone who's very trained in in recognizing this. and in doing so, you're able to unlock a lot of learnings that I think everyone can take a lot of note from. and we definitely want to dive into them here, but I wanna start actually by, going back to that moment, because you described a burnout not being sudden, but like a slow realization. So going back into that, that haze of time where burnout was starting to really set in on you, can you walk us through where you were at when that awareness started to dawn on you and you, it wasn't something temporary.

Kelly Vaughn: 38:26

Yeah, it's really fascinating to be, you know, reflecting in my own experience because it was probably over the course of six months, like it was not a short window. And if I reflect back then my husband. Called it out way before I ever did. And he's like, are you okay? And I'm like, yeah, I'm fine. Everything's fine. This is just a stressful moment right now and we'll get through it. And that stressful moment continued month after month after month and the way the stress presented itself changed over time as well. you know, from feeling extremely bored in my work and feeling like lost of what am I doing? Like who am I as a person, as a manager, what am I doing here to being. So totally overwhelmed with the amount of work that was suddenly on my plate. So that piece of it changed. But what didn't change is my, sleep started to decrease. Like the amount I slept started to decrease the amount, like the quality of sleep I was getting was decreasing. Little physical things. My resting heart rate started to increase. I have a naturally low resting heart rate, and it was 10 over. What it typically is, I, I usually sit in the fifties and my resting heart rate was like constantly in like the sixties, seventies. I would take the weekend off, take the weekend off air quotes there. And I would be stressing about work the entire time. Like all the things that I didn't get through, or in the time when I felt extremely bored or, or just like lost in my career. Like, what should I be doing? And I started having more conversations with, you know, with individuals at the company, with my husband, with my friend. but one of the things that really stood out to me in this process is I noticed how unhappy I was. And I started to notice that my mood was changing at work. I was no longer bought into the mission that we were building. I was starting to pick things apart of like, why are we doing this? This seems like a really bad idea when normally I would question it as anybody should. Again, healthy dose of skepticism. But I was, I was leaning more from that skepticism side into cynicism and that was a really big cue for me that like. I'm not even happy with what I'm doing anymore. And now that I've left the company, I'm still very much team Spot. And I do believe that what they're building is going to be fantastic and, and I am cheering them all like on along the sidelines and actually physically removing myself from the company help me rebuild that respect for what the company was building. And that was a very fascinating finding for me.

Andrew Zigler: 40:57

I've actually been in that same exact shoe before. The way you call it out about how it evolves into cynicism, my personality, I really relate with that.'cause that's exactly how I see it in myself too. I get cynical. That doesn't just happen in burnout, that happens in anything in my life where it starts to go beyond what I want it to be. but when you remove yourself though, and you're able to kind of like take that. That taste outta your mouth about it.

Kelly Vaughn: 41:19

Yeah.

Andrew Zigler: 41:20

you start to feel a lot better. Not in a reminiscent way, not like I want to go back their way,

Kelly Vaughn: 41:24

Right.

Andrew Zigler: 41:25

calling you back there. But the respect that you have for what you were building and what your coworkers were doing, it returns to you. And when that happens, it does help you feel a little more human again, because that cynicism pit that you get in is not fun.

Kelly Vaughn: 41:39

Exactly, and, I called this out in that blog post that I had written that I felt like a shell of a human, and there were a lot of other health related things that were going on at the same time. I. Um, and I was seeing a number of doctors to get some diagnoses that I've been waiting on for a very long time. and so I know that was also contributing to it, but it was showing up physically, like the stress was showing up physically in my body in ways that I never would've imagined. I can count on my two hands how many times I have felt hungry this year. It's that kind of thing that you never actually think about and suddenly you're like, oh. I actually kind of feel a little bit hungry and No, no, nor air quotes. I'm doing a lot of air quotes today. It's great. Uh, no normal person would even give that any thought. Or they might be like, I'm hungry, I'm gonna go get a snack. Meanwhile, I'm like, I'm hungry. Whoa, I'm hungry. This is cool. How exciting.

Andrew Zigler: 42:31

I'm

Kelly Vaughn: 42:31

it's,

Andrew Zigler: 42:31

human experience of

Kelly Vaughn: 42:33

I'm human again.

Andrew Zigler: 42:34

bodily driven experience.

Kelly Vaughn: 42:36

Exactly.

Andrew Zigler: 42:37

Kelly, I think we're the same person. I only eat when other people are around. I need a schedule of people to make me eat.'cause I don't, like, I don't get the hunger thing to pull. I like I, some people get hangry and then they got a. Stop everything and go eat. I'm not, I'm not

Kelly Vaughn: 42:48

I'm not that. No,

Andrew Zigler: 42:49

a foodie. I love my food, but like I can easily forget to eat and that's my own problem to deal with. But like when those little moments, you know, when you could cheer on like, woo,

Kelly Vaughn: 42:58

exactly.

Andrew Zigler: 42:59

It makes you feel like a human.

Kelly Vaughn: 43:01

Yeah.

Andrew Zigler: 43:01

with you.

Kelly Vaughn: 43:02

I've been working with a dietician, uh, since December, and she taught me about mechanical eating and how important it is for, especially those of us, like I am being treated for an eating disorder. So that is one part of this. But for those of us who are very sedentary, but also very like sitting on a desk all day thinking about our work in a very high stress environment. one of the first things your body will do is start to shut down certain signals to like save memory, like your battery is running low on your laptop or your phone background processes, stop running. One of those background processes that stops running is those hunger fullness cues, and I, I'm doing what's called mechanical eating, which is basically I eat on a very set schedule. I don't feel hungry, but I know my body is wanting food because. While it needs energy somehow, and I am now starting to get those hunger cues back because it's learning that it's actually safe. It can actually start to, you know, say, okay, I know I'm going to get food, so therefore I'm just giving you a hint like, Hey, it's probably time that we need to eat and that that is recovery for me. And it's not just like the eating disorder recovery. It is recovery from stress, which I think is one of the coolest things to actually watch happen. Requires a lot of patience. It has been four, almost five months in the making. Now we're getting to that point. But it is so cool to actually see now.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 44:23

Y you are. I feel like I'm learning so much about myself right now. but one thing that really resonates with me is, how this settled in as a gradient that sort of culminated in this like sudden realization that you were unhappy and that something needed to be changed. you know, you mentioned. in one of your blog articles about how as this gradient was happening, you were trying to implement these temporary fixes to solve it. Like you're offloading meetings, you're setting new boundaries with people, but at the end of the day, you ultimately concluded that like you just needed some change because some real change because this gradient wasn't really working for you. So, why do you think it was that those initial boundary setting attempts weren't enough for your situation?

Kelly Vaughn: 45:03

I was too far gone. I think, you know, if you catch the signals early enough and you're like, Hey, I actually haven't taken a vacation in months, it's probably time for me to take some time off work. That can actually be really healing for people. For me, it had been, you know, I went on a vacation back in October of last year, and due to some specific work situations, I ended up being on my laptop 9 out of the 10 days that I was off. And even for like five, 10 minutes, but I never actually truly disconnected and reflecting back on that, like I never, I have not had a proper, like, unplugged vacation in a very long time. and that was part of the problem. And so, you know, I, I talked to a number of folks afterwards and they're like, are you sure? I took 10 days off between leaving Spot and starting at Zapier, and a lot of people were like, are you sure 10 days is enough? And for most people, I would say like take as much time off as you can. I have bills to pay for one thing and second, this is just what I want to do. But for me, it wasn't the amount of time off that I needed, it was the physical change of environment. That I knew I needed. And you know, to be honest, I took those 10 days off. I have two weeks of onboarding that I just completed, and now I'm going on vacation for two weeks. So if you really think about it, it's like five and a half weeks. So yes, it's not a for a formal 10 days off, I'm just getting paid for four of those out, four of those five weeks.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 46:25

Yeah. And, you mentioned earlier how you still believe in the mission of Spot and you still think what they're doing is really awesome. And I agree with you. I've seen, I've seen their advertisements. Super cool product. I'm really

Kelly Vaughn: 46:35

Yeah.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 46:35

by what y'all were building over there. so, you made this decision to leave a role where you were pretty influential, you cared really deeply about the mission, and you were solving some difficult challenges. So what was the process of finally deciding that you had to put yourself first over this company that you had grown pretty attached to?

Kelly Vaughn: 46:57

One of the things, my dietician told me, I was talking to her and she could tell how stressed I was. And you know, we've obviously been talking for months about it at this point. And she just told me point blank, you are never going to recover if you do not fix the environment that is stressing you out. And to be told that it's like, oh, oh, okay, I guess this is actually my responsibility and nobody's gonna magically fix this for me. And. That same week I was having a conversation with my best friend and there was something that she had wanted me to do and I completely dropped the ball on it. And I felt awful about that. and that, like, I was supposed to attend an event that I ended up backing out of at the very last minute. And one thing she said to me was like, I just want my best friend back. Like, you are, you are not yourself. And you know, my best friend can talk to me however she wants because we, I hope she could always be that direct with me and to have my dietician call me out and my best friend call me out, in that same week I was like, okay. Somebody needed to kind of give me that swift kick to say, you are responsible for this change and you need to make this change.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 48:00

Yeah, that's, that's, that's big. That's a big call out. Imagine that that hit pretty hard. So.

Kelly Vaughn: 48:05

Yeah. I'm grateful to have a network and have the relationships available to me to, tell me as it is and call me out when I need to be called out. As I said, like my husband noticed my change, my, my, my downward slope, months before I did, and you know, when you're so close to it, this goes for anything that you do in your life. You know, when you're so close to something, you're the last person to notice a change and it helps to have those external factors of somebody who can, keep you in check.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 48:37

and through all this journey, you've started a new newsletter that's a little bit more personal than your last one, I would say. what was the motivation behind wanting to share this journey so openly? Because, I mean, it is a vulnerable journey. You're talking about personal health and deeply personal issues. why did you start this and what are you hoping that other people would gain from it?

Kelly Vaughn: 48:57

When I published the blog post on, or I guess the newsletter. On the modern leader on quitting and burnout, and just talking about my experience through that, the number of, people who've reached out to me to say, I am going through something very, like very similar. And it wasn't until I read what you wrote that you defined the problem for me. And it happens so often and we are in such a, such a state right now, and kind of going back to the beginning of our conversation where we are moving at lightning speed and the job market is not great. Like we know that it's not great, and so we do fear leaving as well, but we can only handle so much of this. and when you're so deep in the weeds of something as, as I said, like you don't typically notice, you're the last person to find out. And the number of people who reached out to me saying like this resonated with me so much. I have always been the type of person who openly shares my journey on, on whatever it is that I'm thinking about or going through. this is a very heavy topic, but I think it's a necessary topic for people to understand. this is not an uncommon thing. This is something that a lot of people go through very quietly. And there is an, there is another side to it. There is a way out of it, but sometimes you just need somebody to hold your hand and say, you're going through it and it sucks. And this is what it, it's gonna look like on the other side. And this is everything that I'm thinking about as I'm continuing to process this myself. I am feeling infinitely better than I did, you know? Weeks ago. But even then, like I still have my bad days and I'm gonna continue to have my bad days. And that's why I wanna journal about it. And I'm treating After Burnout like a journal. Now my actual journal has very different phrasing in it, which we are not sharing those. Um, so I am cleaning things up a little bit. Uh, but, I want you to get a real look into the day to day of what it looks like to be recovering from burnout. And that is also why. I'm not following like a typical publishing schedule for this. Like when I have a thought, I publish it and you know, it might get annoying at some point when you receive three emails from me in a week, but it's a very brain active week that week. So we'll see how it goes. I'm about 30 days into publishing at this point, which is wild to think that it's already been that long.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 51:17

I.

Andrew Zigler: 51:17

Wow. It sounds like a cool journey that we'll definitely be staying tuned for is we, we learn a little bit more about your after burnout experience and something that you've shared as a really powerful takeaway as part of that is that it's okay to outgrow a version of yourself that. once Fit or once was like your entire identity, it's perfectly fine. to completely shed that and become someone new of those experiences. And I'm curious to know, based on the things you've shared and how you're have this healthy outlook for your new role, how's your definition of ambition and success shifted for you already?

Kelly Vaughn: 51:54

That is a really good question, and I'm actually writing a, a newsletter right now, like a longer form blog post for paid subscribers right now on grieving that loss of ambition because I am still ambitious and I'm always going to be ambitious because this is who I am as a person, but how I'm approaching ambition is different. This time I'm going in with a lot more caution, and I'm going in making sure that I'm keeping an appropriate pace to my ambition. I'm talking to a coach right now actually about this, I don't wanna end up in the same position where I get super, super excited about something and suddenly have four jobs again. Um, that I want to balance that work-life balance with my ambition, and I'm in the process of redefining what that is for me.

Andrew Zigler: 52:41

Mm-hmm.

Kelly Vaughn: 52:42

one of the things that my coach asked me to do is write down. Every time I just feel that urge to like push a little bit more or like take on this extra project or do this extra thing that's not actually part of my job description, just to show how frequently it's happening. So I can start to control that and I can take that and say, all right, these are the things that I'm thinking about. Let me put them in a, uh, like into doist in like a little note section or something. And if at some point I wanna pull out of the bucket and act on one of those things, great. But I no longer feel that need for immediacy to immediately jump on that. And, you know, I'm learning to be happy in the role that I have right now, and that is a very new experience for me.

Andrew Zigler: 53:24

Yeah, that impulse to prove yourself,

Kelly Vaughn: 53:27

Yes,

Andrew Zigler: 53:27

in check. It's like I do that too, where it's like that's how you end up in four jobs. It's because Andrew, you felt like you had to prove to people that you could do four different jobs. It's like you wrote your own fate with this one.

Kelly Vaughn: 53:39

exactly.

Andrew Zigler: 53:40

be your own best ally. If you wouldn't give the person that you work for the advice to go chase this unrelated thing to what they do every day, then why would you go do it yourself? You

Kelly Vaughn: 53:50

Exactly, and that is one of the biggest takeaways I had from this as well. You know, I can spend all day blaming my previous company for giving me that, amount of work to try to handle concurrently. I need to take responsibility for the fact that I opened those doors and I said, yes, give me these things to do, and I am responsible for my own future. It is not somebody else's responsibility to choose that for me. And so knowing that about myself, that I like opening these doors, I might need to just like, you know, put a chair under the doorknob so I can't open the door or something like that, just to, you know, prevent myself from, feeling that urge to open more doors again.

Andrew Zigler: 54:33

Yep.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 54:33

what you're really kind of describing from my perspective is like this idea of being present in the current moment, being conscious of your current situation. So I, you know, we might have some listeners out there that are listening to this right now, and they are themselves are being present and conscious. And after listening to this or thinking, wow, I might actually need to create some change in my life. So let, let's talk about like the transition that you've had coming out of this burnout and how you've started to rethink your priorities. So as you were considering your next move out of spot and ultimately leading to Zapier, excuse me, Zapier.

Kelly Vaughn: 55:07

Hey, you're learning.

Andrew Zigler: 55:09

good job Ben.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 55:11

So what were the key non-negotiable things that you looked for in companies specifically around like the culture and your role, just to make sure that it was gonna be a long-term, sustainable place for you?

Kelly Vaughn: 55:22

So when I was thinking about what I wanted, some of them are deeply personal to me. Um, I wanted to work for one of two types of companies. One was fully remote. Remote by default. No offices. Not like a hybrid in-office, plus remote model, or they had to have an office in Atlanta that I could go to. I'm a very social person and so I need to have that social connection. And a company that is remote by default is going to intentionally create that connection in a different way that a company that has like a hybrid model or an in-office model would.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 55:54

I

Kelly Vaughn: 55:54

That was, that was number one for me because part of what contributed to the burnout was also the feeling of loneliness and feeling that isolation, and I did not want to have that again. Number two is I am very passionate about engineering leadership. I want to continue down that journey. There's a lot that I can learn still from where I am today, and I've taken a very roundabout way to get to where I am today given my educational background and, teaching myself how to code versus the traditional, go to school for computer science, get your first job as an IC and move up. I went from teach myself how to code at 11 to go to grad school or undergrad and grad school for something totally different to, freelancing to running my own company. And then I finally took my first air quotes real job in 2022 when I started working for somebody else. So very, very different path that I took there. So part of that wanted to, I wanted to understand like how can I continue to grow as an engineering leader? And one thing that I had never experienced before was working at a larger company, and I don't mean like a Microsoft, like a 10,000 plus. You know, employees. The largest company I had worked for was a hundred person company. Like there was a lot of room for growth there, and in Zapier hit that like perfect size. That gives me an opportunity to see things at scale where I don't know everybody at the company or everything that's going on, and it's not my job to anymore. That is a skill that I need to learn, and I know that about myself, but how can I now contribute to a larger organization where I'm playing a very critical role in my zone and it's kind of forcing me to kind of stay in my swim lane as well. I.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 57:33

Kelly, thank you so much for joining us today. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and to follow your work?

Kelly Vaughn: 57:42

So my personal website is KV, as in Victor, LL y.com. you can find most of my links on there. I have not linked after burnout on there yet, so I need to do that. But that is@afterburnout.co. my other newsletter is Modern Leader is.

Andrew Zigler: 57:56

Amazing. So we'll make sure that we include the links to Kelly's newsletters in our show notes, and it'll also be on Substack. Be sure to check out our publication on Substack as well. we're recommending that. You know the publications and they're recommending us as well. So both of them are connected. They're easy to find from each other. Be sure to follow these conversations. And I'm certainly gonna be reading along on Kelly's After Burnout journey, and I know that there's more ahead for her. And if you're listening, to this episode and you got this far and you're somehow not already subscribed to Dev Interrupted, please do me a favor before you leave and go fix that. you can join almost 20,000 engineers, and engineering leaders over on Substack as well at Dev Interrupted dot substack.com because each week we cover the latest news in engineering and tech. We write deep dives and articles related to our guests like Kelly today, and we cover so much cool research. and thanks again, Kelly for joining us.

Kelly Vaughn: 58:49

Thank you so much for having me again, as always, it's been a great time.

Andrew Zigler: 58:52

See you next week y'all.