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!

r/IAmA

u/sonne-tanz wrote (the comment Michael replied to):

When I worked at Facebook some years ago, my privacy was invaded by a fellow employee in a retaliatory act after I provided critical feedback about the team’s work. this person instructed a contractor subordinate to access my personal travel history, which included my home addres

u/michaelnovati replied · May 4, 2022 ★ FEATURED

Hi, I've had some tenuous interactions with HR at Facebook and now that I have my own company I see how hard it is to handle private employee matters. HR's job at the company is to ultimately protect the company but protecting the company means also making sure that employees are happy and productive in order to keep the company successful. So when there are conflicts like this it becomes really hard to navigate. These types of conflicts happen at companies of all shapes and sizes and it's messy, because when you take off your Facebook hat, we are people, and people have messiness.