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!

I think I benefited from joining early enough that most of the executives knew me personally by name and didn't feel like walled off people making all the decisions. I was also there when Mark Zuckerberg was positively regarded in the public, unlike today, and there was some amount of cult/worshiping type attitude towards him and the company at that time. I've been watching WeCrashed, SuperPumped, and the Dropout, and I don't remember things being that "cult-like" compared to these stories, but when they make the Facebook dramatization, I'll let you know how I feel haha. In terms of decisions, now that I work on my own company, which is much smaller, I see how hard it is to make decisions and communicate them to the company effectively. Facebook had/has an internal PR team working full time on how to communicate things within the company. I think that does make internal messages feel a little PR-like. But I always felt like I knew these executives a little more like people.