Zameel Syed

When I graduated from the university—this is kind of showing my age a bit now—but it was the year that Tim Berners-Lee published the World Wide Web. So obviously everything I learned at school had become pretty much irrelevant by the time I had graduated. The pace of innovation was equally fast as it was then as it is now, but in terms of what's kept my career going, I think it's being in an industry where you're always pushed to learn. I think just being the kind of person that really enjoys taking on new challenges and growth, that's probably the first thing that’s kept me going. The second thing is that IT as an enabler for business was really at the beginning of its journey. I've seen and witnessed and been part of that effort to really bring IT away from just being a cost center to an enabler for business. To the point now, where obviously in the last 20 years, you've got businesses which are completely centered around IT as a business — SaaS for example. Probably the last thing is just working with really smart people. I’m always trying to gravitate towards smart people and that's kind of kept me interested in the career.

Yeah, I do actually, and it was one that I had caused. Way back in my career, I was working for a company who provided services for the London Stock Exchange—one of the biggest exchanges on the planet. I was doing some maintenance and it's been a long time since I touched console, but for anyone who's a UNIX guru or understands UNIX, I basically did a recursive delete on a file system. The app that I deleted was running in memory, but all the stuff on the file system was gone. I rebooted in the middle of the night, and then the program stopped running.

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At that time, we didn't really have the tools to manage incidents. The company didn't really have a process. It was kind of one of those “learning through experience” kind of things. Not only was I the person who caused the incident, but I was also the person that had to try and fix it. I learned a lot of valuable lessons from that, like, you know, don't do maintenance on your own. Try to get somebody to check things, have a process that allows you to recover your system. Because most importantly, the thing that I failed to do (apart from doing something technically wrong) was communicate properly. The communication was a mess, the ability to communicate en masse to all levels of the company just didn't exist. Thankfully nowadays you have loads of tools to help and most people have processes to do all that. But yeah, that one sticks in my mind and it's something I will never forget.

I would say it came to be organically. DevSecOps has become a bit of a “thing”, but from an organizational perspective if you think about security management and infrastructure management, there are lots of parallels. There are tools that you need to manage the cloud infrastructure, and the tools that you need to manage the application infrastructure, so you get a lot of synergies by just grouping the tools together. Then when you think about it organizationally, and you think about the missions for both, increasingly security is viewed as not a blocker, but as an enabler. The same is true for site reliability engineering. So you've got a shared cultural mission to enable your developer teams to ship as securely and reliably as possible.

Throughout my career, I've always tried to give something back in the form of mentoring. Here at AirCall, we've got a bunch of employee resource groups and this one is really focused on helping women across the organization grow in their careers. What I try to do is just impart some of my experience and try to help people navigate work challenges that they're going through, or just giving some guidance and coaching on how to take that next step.

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I've mentored women in the company who were unsure about how to deal with different management styles or navigate business problems by offering a different perspective. The other thing I found is that I kind of take my experience for granted, and actually when you're mentoring somebody who's younger than you or who's starting their career, just the really simple things can make a massive difference. So for me, it's been hugely rewarding, but it’s also rewarding for the company because it's giving women who are earlier in their careers the support to be leaders themselves, which I would love to see even more of within our company. 

That’s a really hard question. I'm not sure there's anything really exciting to say. I do have an interesting fact. The year that I was born, there was a survey that was done by the UK government. It’s called the British Cohort Study. They basically surveyed all the babies that were born in one week in the year that I was born, and they've continued to survey those people—including me—through adolescence and midlife through to where I am at the moment, and they use that data to inform government policy. So for example, when you hear statistics in the newspapers about a certain age group or certain gender group, that's where they get some of the data from. You'll find it in most countries, they have studies where they follow a particular cohort of people from childhood through to adulthood surveying them. I actually wasn't aware of it until I was in my teenage years and my parents told me.