Who are these customers that get developer support from Microsoft engineering teams?

qingcharles 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

It's expensive. Really expensive. I remember a major bank calling me and my buddy's 2-man consultancy team and telling me they had spent a small fortune on whatever the top-level access to MS developers is, to get some outdated MS COM component to interface with .NET, and MS had failed.

(We charged ~$20K and estimated two weeks. We had it working in two hours.)

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Robin_Message 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

I gotta ask, did you spend a week sucking your teeth after that, or did you hand it to them and say "hey, you're paying for expertise and we got it to you faster than we estimated"?

	▲	orthoxerox 8 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The correct way is the send the customer the almost-final version and wait for the bug report. This way you show how quickly you can tackle the problem but don't make the task look too easy.
	▲	qingcharles 8 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah, exactly a week. There was no way we could send it immediately, despite the fact it was ethically dubious to hold back.

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markus_zhang 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

This sounds pretty challenging. Could you please elaborate on your experience?

	▲	qingcharles 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		This was back in 2004 (?), so too long ago to remember the details. I remember the phone call though because the chap that called us said he been told we never used the word "impossible."

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zoogeny 8 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I worked on a team that did. We had a monthly call with a MS rep and access to devs working on the platform features we were working on (for MS Teams specifically). It is probably more common than you think.

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mikaraento 8 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember being able to file support cases just by buying one for a couple of hundred dollars. They'd also promise that if it turned out to be a bug in the product the fee would be refunded.

(My case wasn't solved. It was something about variable delays in getting packets off the network and into userspace but we never got to the bottom of it).

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tgv 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

I worked for a small shop that provided something MS couldn’t/wouldn’t, but which was essential for their international business anyway. So we too had engineering support.