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Comment by tasogare | Hacker News Reader

> Full-time development Standard €42.39 per month

So, 2 years of developpement cost the price of a nice laptop, which you need anyway to access the cloud.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/visual-stu...

This looks to be a very good solution to enterprise companies that want to hire remote contractors as it gives them a platform that is much cheaper and arguable more (easy to) secure than other solutions such as VDI and VPN.

Once this is fully integrated with Azure and Office 365 it’s basically a one stop shop for outsourcing development work and if the pricing remains the same it’s also a very cheap one.

You are missing one of the point of contracting: I'm the only one to decide, what kind of development environment I use and also, the kind of email/calendar/etc environment I use. And if it has anything to do with Office 365 I would not even poke it with a spiky stick covered in feces.

I believe s/he means large scale contracting like Accenture and overseas IT shops, not smaller scale one person contracting

It can be both that poster over estimates just how many people have the luxury of choosing who to contract for based on what tools they have to work with.

In fact it seems to me very petty and unprofessional attitude in the first place.

And it would also prevent them from working for any company in a regulated sector or any company that cares about security and information governance not to mention about productivity; I’ve seen plenty of contractors like this being kicked out after the 3 time they missed a meeting because hipstermail or stallmanmail couldn’t parse the WebEx links in the meeting invite, they couldn’t open a Visio diagram or worse we found they were trying to push code into private repos or using some online code beautification services...

Unless you are working on tiny projects as a contractor you are going to be obligated to use what ever tools the client uses, and in fact adherence to the “company spirit” is often more expected from contractors than internal teams that can get some leeway through internal politics.

I, oddly, see a different pricing structure on that page. Full-time development Standard €55.10. This is assuming 100 active hours. "Active" being defined as "a user is connected […] via the browser-based editor". If I log in at 9AM and log out at 5PM every day for an average of 20 working days each month, I'd probably run ~€90 a month on the standard instance (and considerably more on the Premium instance). My current laptop cost around €1, 200 and I can easily provision a new one at any time using an Ansible playbook[1].

I am most definitely not the target audience of VS Online, which is perfectly fine. Someone out there needs this for it to have been built by MS.

[1]: https://github.com/StanAngeloff/longitude

> I, oddly, see a different pricing structure on that page. Full-time development Standard €55.10.

Different regions have different prices, parent selected East US.

This is most likely aimed at Enterprise customers. The main benefit of this seems to be rapid scalability, compared to provisioning each laptop individually, setting up VPNs, etc.

It's similar to how cloud hosting is often considerably more expensive than a full server with equivalent specs. You pay a premium for flexibility.

I’d assume you can run builds that require 64GB RAM and 18 cores or whatever from your cheap ass chrome book, surface or iPad.

And you can also travel without a laptop. Just get a rental or a tablet or whatever at your destination.

Also cool: the device you travel with doesn’t need any company secrets. I imagine some would find that important when dealing with border control/TSA.

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