The future of the terminal is not a terminal | Warp’s Zach Lloyd

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
I'm Andrew Zigler, I'm your host here at Dev Interrupted. And this week, we're bringing Zach Lloyd of Warp on the show. And Zach, he was the principal engineer for Google Sheets, and recently the interim CTO at Time Magazine before he created Warp, the agentic terminal. And Warp's goal was to reclaim the command line as the ultimate environment for developers. And I'm really excited to unpack everything in our interview with him. But first, we're bringing back our recent guest, Brooke Hartley Moy of Infactory as our news segment guest host this week. Brooke, welcome back. You've been in the hot seat before, and now you're here doing the news. Thanks for coming back on the show to hang out with us.

**Brooke Hartley Moy** (0:43)
Of course. It was a delight the first time. Glad to get a round two in.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:48)
We're so happy for it too. And this week's news segment is really fun. I know you and I are going to have a blast talking about some of the stuff we have lined up. And today we're looking at teams versus individual OKRs and tech teams, and what that looks like in a memo from ThoughtWorks, why liberal arts majors should rejoice, reflections on a career in tech from one of our favorite authors here at Dev Interrupted, and the fight for audience mind share continues between AIs and publishers. We have the recent scoop and we're going to talk about that more. So with that, let's jump right in with our first story about team OKRs. And this is a memo from Paolo Corolli of ThoughtWorks about OKRs as a whole, used to drive top-down initiatives from an executive team. And he really highlights the difference between those OKRs that are set purely in an executive top-down fashion versus OKRs that are set by the teams themselves. This is what distinguishes a high-performing team, according to his research and this memo from ThoughtWorks we're going to link. So it really comes down to top-down versus self-directed goals, being a game-changer for how folks actually aligning it their work done. And I want to use this opportunity to maybe ask you, Brooke, you're a founder, you experience all things around goal setting, what's your perspective on OKRs?

**Brooke Hartley Moy** (2:10)
Yeah, it's interesting because I've seen it from both sides. Obviously, currently as a founder, doing it at a small company with a small team, but then also previously being at large companies like Google, which really in many ways sort of invented the OKR process when it comes to high-performing engineering and product teams. And I think what often gets misunderstood about OKRs is that they actually are intended to be largely a bottoms-up process as far as the execution side. So you have strategy and priorities set at a high level. And I think that's important. I think it's important in a small company and in a big company. The role of the executive and leadership team is to say, this is where the ship is going and to point everybody in that direction.
How everybody gets there now completely needs to be bottoms up. The idea that you at a high level, seven rungs of leadership away from somebody who's actually completing a particular project or completely completing some bit of work, that you're going to be able to have the level of understanding that you're going to need to make that efficient and effective is ludicrous. And so I do think this gets confused a lot. And I think the other side of it is then now being on a small team, where there's obviously very little distance between leadership and individuals, if you aren't involving the individuals on your team in the goal setting process, you are 100% going to slow everything down because they're just not going to have the clarity that they need as to... We think of FQRs around here on almost a daily basis or an hourly basis. So there needs to be that ongoing communication at the team level or you're not going to get anything done.

**Andrew Zigler** (3:46)
That's a great perspective. It's also really insightful for me as someone who has the more IC perspective of fulfilling those OKRs. I know I myself always can strive harder and do better at those OKRs when I'm involved in setting them. Because you can at the beginning set expectations and also be able to be ambitious in ways that maybe those above you don't know that they can dream that you can do. And so setting your own OKRs is a fun process. It's really great to learn how you think about it as well.
And in the next article we're going to tap into is one that I know that we're going to have a blast talking about just because of our backgrounds and we can both fill in more color in that in a moment. But there's an article from Kristin Stoller about the age of AI and how it means some tech leaders are reconsidering the communications degree as maybe the ultimate killer, right, on an application versus the traditional STEM and computer science degrees. And all I can say to that is liberal arts rise up. That is definitely the anthem that I march to. Those listening to Dev Interrupted are no stranger to the fact that I am a, I studied classics in college. I have a history degree background. I come from liberal arts and I firmly believe in its power within traditionally science oriented fields like STEM. I think there's a lot of contributions that liberal arts majors can bring. You know, there's a lot of folks that have been on our show who have also come from similar backgrounds, and have been history oriented. But I wanted to take a moment. Brooke, what do you think on this?