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, yeah I'm busy but trying to answer questions! Regarding finding company fit its both algorithmic matching and your Formation Team human effort (you have a dedicated Fellow Manager and your own private channel with a career coach and engineers, so literally a team of humans to help). The algorithms help make the humans more efficient, so you can get great advice from very experienced people and we can scale the cost associated with having so many senior people on your side. Everything you do week to week, both the individual activity and the sessions with mentors are mostly algorithmic and again, with your Fellow Manager and our technical team fine tuning things by hand to make sure we dot all the Is and cross all the Ts. Algorithms are much better at scheduling hundreds of unique hyper focused sessions fitting into everyones schedules every week than a human could ever be haha. The job hunting process is a little less "algorithmic" than the training because it's less in our control - you can get randomly pinged by a recruiter, you have some control over interview dates, but not all. Some people have zero problems getting interviews, and our work is focused on prioritizing and optimizing scheduling, Some people have a harder time getting interviews and we're focused more on finding opportunities. The human side comes more into play. The algorithms are for surfacing potential opportunities from a large pool. Sorry, long answer and hopefully it's clear, let me know if there are more questions.