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!

I'm not sure in interviews actually. I had interviewed E6s and M2, D1, but never E7s. Back when I was there there were very E7s and most rose from within. At the time, some of the E7+ that were hired in, left after no too long. Part of the problem was that this level is paid so highly at other FAANG and the people have a lot of respect and influence, so it was incredibly hard to get them to leave their companies. Not sure if that changed since 2017... a lot has haha. So for me, they created coding machine for me and I pushed on my side to have that impact recognized. I have friends who had more naturally recognized superpowers. One person wrote very few lines of code but when he did, it saved tens of millions of dollars. Another was just brilliant. The most straightforward path was archetecting infrastructure that was industry leading (in terms of performance or feature set at scale) At the end of the day though fairness was #1. Directors and VPs would sit down and try to make sure that people with similar impact had similar levels.