A quick introduction to business finance

Often, engineers think about things such as software performance, metrics, servers, hard drives and network bandwidth. Instead, we will first dive into some business finance. I have found that many software developers are interested in finance (see cryptocurrencies, flash trading, gambling, and so on), but it took me a long time to be turned on to it. As such, people would speak finance jargon and I would smile and nod. Frequently, I did not realize what was being implied about how the business thought about my team or about how our CEO viewed economics. I bring this up now because one of the most significant aspects of capacity planning is figuring out money: discovering how your business deals with money and how to acquire it for your team. Can you ask your CEO to approve a $50,000 purchase or do you need to work with the finance department? Does your company have a budget for increases in infrastructure costs? Often, you will interact...