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 haven't worked there for a few years now, so I'm sure the culture has changed, but when I was there software engineers had a lot respect and leeway to work on their own schedules and prioritize their day to day. The expectations for impact were very high, so people who were not having impact definitely felt under pressure. A lot of people I worked with were used to get good grades in school and they put a lot of pressure on themselves to deliver. The reason why I see people go there now is the scale. Working on giant systems, working on incredibly hard problems. You can see from some comments how much negative sentiment there is towards Facebook, and people genuinely want to try to make Facebook better.