5 ms·

I'd love to hear this story! Seems crazy ... but we live in a crazy world.

vulcan01 6y ago
When I worked at MS Azure, we had to pay for Azure servers! (I believe our team had a $5k/month Azure bill.) It's part of internal budgeting, so that people within MS don't splurge on expensive things (because it does cost MS money for each person on Teams).
- names_are_hard 6y ago
  Did you drop a k? What can you do with 50 dollars?
  - vulcan01 6y ago
    Yes, thank you, it should be $5k. Edited.
scott_w 6y ago
Unrelated to software but the company my dad works for (motor repair) has to buy all its parts from its own distribution arm, at the marked up price. He then has to turn a profit on those parts as well as pricing the labour. If cost price is £5 and the markup is 20%, he has to pay £6 to get the part, then charge £7.20 on the invoice to the customer. I’ll let you guess what that does to tender bids ;-)
names_are_hard 6y ago
At Microsoft if you build a product using Azure (and if you want to use the cloud you MUST use Azure, you're not going to get approval to write a check to AWS) the costs come out of your budget. And it's taken seriously, to the point where teams will very much emphasize managing costs (what will this new feature cost on our Azure bill? Can we build it more efficiently? Oh wow, that refactor saved us 100k/month in cloud costs, don't forget that when we start talking about promotions...)
- lostapathy 6y ago
  That makes sense since the amount you could use is variable. I was thinking more like somebody couldn't get a free word license at a MS subsidiary or something.
josephg 6y ago
My uncle used to work at Compaq (back before they got bought by HP). When their computers broke, his team had to pay their support staff to get them fixed. (Via internal budgeting). But the support team knew internal customers would call them anyway and it was still compaq’s money, so they charged several times more for internal support calls than normal support calls. My uncle’s team was having none of that, so they paid an external computer repair service to fix their computers. The external repair service subcontracted to compaq’s internal people anyway, so when their computers broke they called up (and paid) external consultants. Who in turn called compaq’s internal support team, who came downstairs and fixed their computers at a competitive price.
maccard 6y ago
Very mundane I'm afraid. Worked for a MS subsidiary, on an online game for xbox and PC. Developed on windows, using visual studio and deployed on azure, used TFS for bug tracking. All of the above costs were tracked rigorously, and charged to the project. Most frustrating was complying with the visual studio licenses across the board, with no assistance from the licensing team. We had an account manager for all of the above but my understanding is that he was more of an auditor than anything else.

When I worked at MS Azure, we had to pay for Azure servers! (I believe our team had a $5k/month Azure bill.) It's part of internal budgeting, so that people within MS don't splurge on expensive things (because it does cost MS money for each person on Teams).

names_are_hard 6y ago
Did you drop a k? What can you do with 50 dollars?
- vulcan01 6y ago
  Yes, thank you, it should be $5k. Edited.

scott_w 6y ago

Unrelated to software but the company my dad works for (motor repair) has to buy all its parts from its own distribution arm, at the marked up price. He then has to turn a profit on those parts as well as pricing the labour. If cost price is £5 and the markup is 20%, he has to pay £6 to get the part, then charge £7.20 on the invoice to the customer. I’ll let you guess what that does to tender bids ;-)

names_are_hard 6y ago

At Microsoft if you build a product using Azure (and if you want to use the cloud you MUST use Azure, you're not going to get approval to write a check to AWS) the costs come out of your budget. And it's taken seriously, to the point where teams will very much emphasize managing costs (what will this new feature cost on our Azure bill? Can we build it more efficiently? Oh wow, that refactor saved us 100k/month in cloud costs, don't forget that when we start talking about promotions...)

lostapathy 6y ago
That makes sense since the amount you could use is variable. I was thinking more like somebody couldn't get a free word license at a MS subsidiary or something.

josephg 6y ago

My uncle used to work at Compaq (back before they got bought by HP). When their computers broke, his team had to pay their support staff to get them fixed. (Via internal budgeting). But the support team knew internal customers would call them anyway and it was still compaq’s money, so they charged several times more for internal support calls than normal support calls. My uncle’s team was having none of that, so they paid an external computer repair service to fix their computers. The external repair service subcontracted to compaq’s internal people anyway, so when their computers broke they called up (and paid) external consultants. Who in turn called compaq’s internal support team, who came downstairs and fixed their computers at a competitive price.

maccard 6y ago

Very mundane I'm afraid. Worked for a MS subsidiary, on an online game for xbox and PC. Developed on windows, using visual studio and deployed on azure, used TFS for bug tracking. All of the above costs were tracked rigorously, and charged to the project. Most frustrating was complying with the visual studio licenses across the board, with no assistance from the licensing team. We had an account manager for all of the above but my understanding is that he was more of an auditor than anything else.