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! Behavioral interviews are a tough one to give advice on because they depend a lot on your company's goals and what they are looking for in the interview. For example, at Facebook the behavioral portion was aiming to measure: 1. Scope of responsibility in past job. This is important for determining someone's level. Trying to ask questions so you can compare their previous responsibilities to the different levels at Facebook and pattern match. 2. Past performance. I don't remember if Facebook explicitly trains for this, but I like to try to guage how the person was performing in their last job in some kind of measurements. Like performance ratings, relative performance to peers, awards at previous job that we're rare, etc... 3. Values alignment. When I was at Facebook, the values we're things like 'move fast and break things', and 'nothing is someone else's problem'. I would ask about their work experience and look for examples that align with the values or ask questions if they came up. Like 'wow that sounds like a complex cross team issue, what role did you play in solving it?' or 'you mentioned X was blocked because of another team, what could have done to ship it anyways or work around that' 4. Red flags. Half the job of this interview is looking for classic red flags. Inconsistencies with no explanation, lies on resume, misstated work experience, past HR issues that might be HR issues as your company and we're not addressed, a generally blaming attitude towards everyone/badmouthing all past employers,