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, good question. I feel like this question comes up as well for seed-stage tech investors as well and they all have different answers to how to spot someone with high potential. I have two different approaches: 1. Pattern matching against others. So people who had similar projects/experience in the past and seeing how they performed, and projecting if the person might follow a similar path. 2. Particularly unique or interesting experiences/projects/career progression. This might sound like 1. and somethings might overlap, but this is about looking for anti-patterns. People who are so far different from the observed patterns that you want to dig deeper. Finally, I think everyone is high potential in some ways and finding the right environment to express that is the missing piece that I hope to help solve.