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/sickofgooglesshit wrote (the comment Michael replied to):

Just reminds me of people at Google with massive LOC counts for doing nothing more than moving protos ;-) I'd be more curious about how you pushed back on a Bad Decision like say, user privacy or simplified an approach to a systems challenge that might have otherwise been a cost

u/michaelnovati replied · May 4, 2022 ★ FEATURED

My L7 level impact came from not just the raw code output, but pushing the entire company to care more about code cleanliness. This started as the "Dead Code Society" (tshirts and all) to encourage people to refactor and get rid of old abstractions and tidy up. If I stayed longer that might even have evolved into L8 level impact.