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!

Hey! Haha, I'm similar and I usually spend the first hour or two (or three) in the morning working responding to others, unblocking people, and working with our Fellows to make sure they get the best experience possible. There are probably a lot of jobs like this but coding is both technical and creative. So having a short period of focus and creative juices flowing can result in not just large amounts, but solving hard problems quickly. Other times it's like writer's block and I just can't get the motivation to do something really simple. I would doubt this works generically, but when something comes up I add it to my TODO list for today and every day I work as late as I need to to clear out the TODO list until it's empty. If I misjudged the size of something, I break it up and add the rest to my backlog to be reprioritized tomorrow.