Minimum Viable Bureaucracy with Laura Thomson

Laura Thomson is the vice president of engineering at Fastly, well-known in the CDN space and makers of an edge cloud platform. She ended up in this position after a 12-plus-year stint at Mozilla, where she rose through the ranks and ended up as the senior director of engineering for Firefox engineering operations. She also worked as a lecturer at RMIT University and co-founded a web design agency, where she worked for eight years. Laura has written several best-selling software development books and is on the board of trustees at the Internet Society. Join Corey and Laura as they talk about how Fastly has evolved over the years, what the Internet Society is and what it does, what it was like using the internet in the dark ages of the 1980s and 1990s, how the internet is actually getting less and less open in recent years, how it’s tough to build trusting relationships without meeting coworkers in real life, what it’s like to be a leader during the pandemic, why effective leaders need to be able to code switch, what it’s like to lead with an anti-authority streak, the benefits of rotating employees through positions to give them a bit of experience, why you need to pay interns, and more.