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, glad to hear you on the road and trying to have a positive impact! I left Facebook a few years ago and it continues to grow, so I've heard it can feel harder to see the impact. When you zoom out of the day to day, the promotion guidelines, the performance reviews, try to take a look at what impact your code has had on others. For me, I like working on user facing stuff because I see the impact (good and bad) almost immediately. I loved (and still love) working all weekend on a tool for a small non-engineering team to make their lives easier, and see them smile when they use it. I loved working on Facebook Groups and seeing the creative ways people were using the features to really have a meaningful impact on the members lives. To get up to Facebook's E7 it takes a lot of support from a lot of people, and despite being a coding machine heads-down coder, you need to build relationships with fairly senior executives who will be comparing your work to other E7s at the company. Only 1-2%ish (not sure the number now) of people are E7, so it's fairly niche and I would focus first on crushing it across the board to get to E6 (\~staff)