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!

Wow I didn't realize how downvoted my response was, I might have messed up how I communicated that. I would love to keep trying because I feel the only way we can move forward is try to understand. What I'm talking about above is let's say Facebook is like "we need to add a new feature to upload files to share with friends". The first response isn't "won't people just pirate things illegally!", "won't people upload porn!" it's literally "how will we make sure the uploader can share this with specific people they want to and from an engineering level, only those people can see this file, ever.". This is a low level of "privacy" that I think is missing the mark. But I've seen drop-everything emergencies and the most senior engineers working on these problems if there was ever an issue. A privacy bug would be a SEV 1 emergency. I fully acknowledge this is not on the same page as the concerns above, or else there wouldn't be so much polarization, and am eager to shut up and listen.