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/vanvoorden wrote (the comment Michael replied to):

Howdy! Glad to hear you are working on your own company. Sounds really cool! A question I always like to ask former people of FB is "What's the worst bug you ever shipped?". For example, I once broke composer in the production Big Blue iOS App (the version live on App Store).

u/michaelnovati replied · May 4, 2022 ★ FEATURED

I can talk vaguely about this because the details might be confidential still. Facebook has a way to run a migration when you want to change an existing data model for something. I ran a migration that had a bug and overwrote billions of edges of data. Fortunately I was able to fully resolve/repair it really quickly, but it was a stressful birthday that year at 4am.