Principal Software Engineer
Principal Software Engineer
Great salary.
Sometimes the work can be interesting and meaningful.
Starting to change, but it's hard to change with so much legacy crap and invested bureaucracy.
Everything that happens there is usually a 100+ person project, so that's good and bad.
The good is that it can be hugely impactful, and the bad is that it's slow as molasses.
Lots of churn and uncertainty. The review systems and stack ranking still exist, even if managers deny it! (I was a manager there.) This results in way too much dishonesty and "looking good" to managers to get top compensation. Folks are afraid of looking bad, so there's a lack of candor about issues.
Be honest.
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Microsoft Interview Questions
Microsoft Interview Experiences
Principal Software Development Lead
Relatively simple programming and design questions.
Software Engineer Intern
Very straightforward, two back-to-back thirty-minute technical interviews that had a combination of LeetCode easy and medium questions, along with some behavioral questions that were sprinkled in there.
Software Engineering Intern
It was one round, two interviews: one technical and one behavioral. It took about a month to get the interview request and a week to hear back. The behavioral round also had some minimal technical questions.
Principal Software Development Lead
United StatesOctober 27, 2013Relatively simple programming and design questions.
Software Engineer Intern
Redmond, Washington, United StatesNovember 21, 2025Very straightforward, two back-to-back thirty-minute technical interviews that had a combination of LeetCode easy and medium questions, along with some behavioral questions that were sprinkled in there.
Software Engineering Intern
Redmond, Washington, United StatesNovember 20, 2025It was one round, two interviews: one technical and one behavioral. It took about a month to get the interview request and a week to hear back. The behavioral round also had some minimal technical questions.
