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!

Hi, good questions. I don't think there is conscious bias, but humans have unconscious biases. Facebook runs this (I believe mandatory) session on acknowledging unconscious biases to try to help surface some of those things. They try to have the interview processes surface these unconscious biases as well. When I left, engineers were encouraged to use gender neutral pronouns when talking about candidates. I've seen tremendous efforts in recent years across all of big tech to try to get to address demographics that are underrepresented in tech and they are just starting to move the needles a tiny bit. However, even the areas that companies track in their "diversity reports" are a fraction of the hundreds of things we should be tracking and I think this will continue to be something invested in at least a decade to see the results. Formation exists to accelerate this. Open source on resume can be great. A few suggestions: 1. Make it clear the project was open source and what your contributions were to it 2. At the end of the day, people are looking for experience, so if the open source project had hundreds of thousands or millions of people using it and had some of the problems a large product would have then you want to highlight those aspects. 3. If you open sourced a project, or it's a project with a few people on it that no one really uses in public to a large degree, then that is more like a really good college group project and I would describe it that way.