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, this is a really good series of questions that I have thoughts on. * RE: Formation/the time it takes/business model. Our mission is to get people who have non traditional backgrounds, underrepresented in tech level up into these top tier roles. It takes everyone a variable amount of time. If you are committed to putting in the time you think you need, you are paying us to spend that time more efficiently at Formation. You are paying us for the outcome - to get a top tier job you are happy with. The gaps that are needed vary from person to person. We've built technology to help us figure this out and fine tune the training for these needs. So the interview fashions of the day aren't really that relevant to our business. * RE: Types of interviews. Data structures and algorithms interviews level the playing field. Google gets like a million job applications a year or something and there are thousands of stacks and frameworks and languages people use. Data structures and algorithms as imperfect as they are, let Google fairly evaluate people. * RE: Memorization. I disagree with this. It's a side effect of Blind, Leetcode, and to some degree Reddit that people obsess over memorization a list of problems they think they will get at a company. This might get you through a round with a more junior engineer, but trust me, I've done hundreds of interviews and trained people how to interview, and a really good interviewer will cut through the memorization with very unique and sometimes absurd follow up questions. At Facebook, typically at least one interviewer will be the experience kind, often more. This isn't true for all companies though. Amazon has a more variable process that I think memorization might work under certain circumstances. Google definitely not.