I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

hey, I haven't worked on coding for the metaverse yet! ( I have something like 15,000 commits in the past two years working on Formation, so I'm busy in the non-metaverse right now) I do hop into some Oculus worlds every once and a while, we use this product called Gather to hangout casually at Formation, and Tandem to chat for work related things. If we look at the richness/engagement of online human to human interaction over time, it's gone from very limited async text, to voice, to photos, to videos, video calls, etc... I think the social side of the metaverse will be about bringing even more richness to our online human interactions. It might not be about funny looking avatars, but just richer interactions. I still have so many text-based chat interactions with customer service for example, where I get really angry and lose my patience in a way I would not in a more face to face context. Maybe the world will be a better place if some of these anonymous interactions have have more human-feeling to them.