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!

Hi, I actually sat down a while ago and thought about the question and came up with four characteristics that all the best engineers had: 1. Grit: this almost obsessive drive to solve problems, debug, and keep trying different approaches. 2. Curiosity: always figuring out why something works the way it does, rather than saying "it just works". 3. Ownership: taking responsibility for your code and proactively improving it. Not pushing off problems you can solve to other people. 4. Team impact: making those around you better. The best of the best are incredibly good in one of these in particular. In terms of other roles: product managers and designers are adjacent to engineers when building products and are important pieces.