Jed Wagner on Being the Sole Maintainer of the Veterans Appeals System

https://logicmag.io/care/jed-wagner-on-being-the-sole-maintainer-of-the-veterans-appeals-system

The Veterans Appeals Control and Locator System, or VACOLS, starts and ends with Jed Wagner. In the late 1980s, Wagner was hired as a part-time contractor by the Department of Veterans Affairs. He started single-handedly building the system that he was ultimately hired to work on full-time. Now, thirty years later, VACOLS is processing its last appeals, and when the system is sunsetted, he will retire.

Originally, the system’s primary job was to know the locations of the physical files of the 30,000 or so veterans who appealed their benefits decisions. Over time, VACOLS grew and became more complex as Wagner iterated and added modules like courtroom scheduling and video hearings. He would gather requirements directly from judicial review officers, judges, and administrators, deploy a prototype, get feedback, and deploy again—years before Agile became a popular approach to software development.

The Veterans Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act of 2017 created infrastructure and funding for a new appeals system that hopes to resolve appeals in six months as opposed to three to seven years. In a pivot away from the old paradigm where one long-term employee spends their career caring for the system they built themselves, the new appeals system will be overseen by a termed employee and then handed off to the next termed employee after that.

We sat down with Jed at the end of May 2020 to talk what he built, and what’s next.

Was “data journalism” a failure? What went wrong at FiveThirtyEight @ Disney?

https://www.natesilver.net/i/148340021/was-data-journalism-a-failure-what-went-wrong-at-fivethirtyeight-disney

Phil B asks:

I would like to hear more about how Nate’s ambitions for data journalism have evolved since he started 538. What did “conquering the world” mean back then? What changed? Also, with the rise of US sports betting and mainstream sports media coming to terms with that fact, what does Nate think about the prospects for a more data-oriented approach in sports journalism?

Thanks for the question, Phil. This is already a long newsletter, and I was tempted to break this response out into a separate post rather than burying it here. But having multiple threads for SBSQ wound up being confusing last time. I’m going to warn subscribers that I may adapt this response for a standalone post in the future, though — it will go on the Rainy Day List.

The early days of FiveThirtyEight @ Disney, circa 2014-2016 and originally under the auspices of ESPN, was a period I consider unsuccessful despite being presented with a very generous opportunity. I think I made a lot of mistakes and I frequently think about what went wrong. FiveThirtyEight, in my biased opinion, developed into an excellent site by ~2018 (until Disney basically let us stop re-hiring open positions by ~2021, a sign of trouble to come). But those early years were rough, and I was unhappy, so here’s an inventory of Mistakes That Were Made — or really Mistakes That I Made — should any of you find yourself in a similar position