4 ms·

Sun's JRuby team jumps ship to Engine Yard

49 points by abennett 17y ago

hypermatt 17y ago
Good news, was getting oracle was going to own to many of the techonologies in my stack :) mysql, java, jruby.
psranga 17y ago
I would have thought Oracle would have been a safer choice What's 3 extra engineers to a behemoth like Oracle? ("Two out of the three developers making this move have families; we want to make sure JRuby will get to the next level, and we had to make a decision") Whereas their salaries are serious money to EY. I'm curious why they thought EY would be a safer home for them.
- mahmud 17y ago
  Even if EY can't keep them for more than another year, the salaries would allow them to keep working on their pet project for that long and push out a few "good enough" features just to keep the community happy. After that they can jump ship again and start their own JRuby consulting firm; all it takes is just one or two big clients that need support. The fact that they're currently employed to maintain JRuby would certainly guarantee big firms taking notice and consider using it ("hey, there is actually someone we can pay for support", etc.)
- jshen 17y ago
  It seems that EY is going to focus on jruby instead of rubinius.
  - jamesbritt 17y ago
    Where in the world did you get that from?
    - gaius 17y ago
      It's a reasonable assumption given that they're laying off Rubinius developers and hiring JRuby developers. Tho' you'd be hard-pressed to do that in the UK, an industrial tribunal would wonder why you didn't even attempt to cross train them and offer them jobs doing JRuby.
      - jamesbritt 17y ago
        http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/engine-yard-adds-jruby-support/ http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/engine-yard-adds-jruby-s... "With JRuby support, our ongoing maintenance of the 1.8.6 branch of MRI and our continued sponsorship of Rubinius, ..." Emphasis mine.
      - gaius 17y ago
        Seriously, tho' this is what's wrong with the IT industry. Meta their job descriptions up one level and their roles are all "Ruby implementor". Just one's flavour of the month and one isn't. Imagine your company was switching from Linux distro A to distro B and simply sacked all the sysadmins and hired ones with a different "certification". Engine Yard would get eaten alive for this anywhere in Europe.
        daeken 17y ago
        The challenges in implementing your own VM and implementing a dynamic layer on top of the JVM are entirely different. It's not like moving from one distro to another, it's like moving from Linux to a custom RTOS and expecting your existing kernel people to do the job as well as existing RTOS developers.
        gaius 17y ago
        They're certainly smart enough to, so why not? Like I say this is a problem across the IT industry, hiring managers want buzzword-compliance with the very latest thing, and never mind that the actual value in any IT organization is in the people that know the business and have a track record of identifying and solving problems in it. The job market's not great right now but individuals have longer memories than organizations, and companies that show no loyalty to their people now are going to pay over the odds for talent when the market picks up.
- compay 17y ago
  It might not be safer, perhaps just a better environment. Most of the people I know who work at EY seem to love working there.
- acangiano 17y ago
  > I would have thought Oracle would have been a safer choice What's 3 extra engineers to a behemoth like Oracle? Conversely, at Oracle they are just three developers. At Engine Yard, they may be considered as a valuable, strategic resource.
quellhorst 17y ago
I hope they don't get laid off like the rubinius team http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=368167 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=368167
- bhrgunatha 17y ago
  Yes that puzzled me too. I guess Engine Yard can see some business value - maybe offering support for people that have already chosen JRuby for their projects or perhaps they will feel more able to support Java in their services.
  - jshen 17y ago
    The later is definitely important to them. A lot of rails apps use solr as a search engine, as I did with my EY slices, and they were very upfront with their desire to get more expertise on the jvm.
- compay 17y ago
  Well, if they help EY develop products based around Java and JRuby, that opens up a potentially very profitable market for them. So I think they'll have more incentive to keep them on board for a while.

49 points by abennett 17y ago

Good news, was getting oracle was going to own to many of the techonologies in my stack :) mysql, java, jruby.

I would have thought Oracle would have been a safer choice What's 3 extra engineers to a behemoth like Oracle? ("Two out of the three developers making this move have families; we want to make sure JRuby will get to the next level, and we had to make a decision") Whereas their salaries are serious money to EY. I'm curious why they thought EY would be a safer home for them.

mahmud 17y ago
Even if EY can't keep them for more than another year, the salaries would allow them to keep working on their pet project for that long and push out a few "good enough" features just to keep the community happy. After that they can jump ship again and start their own JRuby consulting firm; all it takes is just one or two big clients that need support. The fact that they're currently employed to maintain JRuby would certainly guarantee big firms taking notice and consider using it ("hey, there is actually someone we can pay for support", etc.)
jshen 17y ago
It seems that EY is going to focus on jruby instead of rubinius.
- jamesbritt 17y ago
  Where in the world did you get that from?
  - gaius 17y ago
    It's a reasonable assumption given that they're laying off Rubinius developers and hiring JRuby developers. Tho' you'd be hard-pressed to do that in the UK, an industrial tribunal would wonder why you didn't even attempt to cross train them and offer them jobs doing JRuby.
    - jamesbritt 17y ago
      http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/engine-yard-adds-jruby-support/ http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/engine-yard-adds-jruby-s... "With JRuby support, our ongoing maintenance of the 1.8.6 branch of MRI and our continued sponsorship of Rubinius, ..." Emphasis mine.
    - gaius 17y ago
      Seriously, tho' this is what's wrong with the IT industry. Meta their job descriptions up one level and their roles are all "Ruby implementor". Just one's flavour of the month and one isn't. Imagine your company was switching from Linux distro A to distro B and simply sacked all the sysadmins and hired ones with a different "certification". Engine Yard would get eaten alive for this anywhere in Europe.
      - daeken 17y ago
        The challenges in implementing your own VM and implementing a dynamic layer on top of the JVM are entirely different. It's not like moving from one distro to another, it's like moving from Linux to a custom RTOS and expecting your existing kernel people to do the job as well as existing RTOS developers.
        gaius 17y ago
        They're certainly smart enough to, so why not? Like I say this is a problem across the IT industry, hiring managers want buzzword-compliance with the very latest thing, and never mind that the actual value in any IT organization is in the people that know the business and have a track record of identifying and solving problems in it. The job market's not great right now but individuals have longer memories than organizations, and companies that show no loyalty to their people now are going to pay over the odds for talent when the market picks up.
compay 17y ago
It might not be safer, perhaps just a better environment. Most of the people I know who work at EY seem to love working there.
acangiano 17y ago
> I would have thought Oracle would have been a safer choice What's 3 extra engineers to a behemoth like Oracle? Conversely, at Oracle they are just three developers. At Engine Yard, they may be considered as a valuable, strategic resource.

quellhorst 17y ago

I hope they don't get laid off like the rubinius team http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=368167 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=368167

bhrgunatha 17y ago
Yes that puzzled me too. I guess Engine Yard can see some business value - maybe offering support for people that have already chosen JRuby for their projects or perhaps they will feel more able to support Java in their services.
- jshen 17y ago
  The later is definitely important to them. A lot of rails apps use solr as a search engine, as I did with my EY slices, and they were very upfront with their desire to get more expertise on the jvm.
compay 17y ago
Well, if they help EY develop products based around Java and JRuby, that opens up a potentially very profitable market for them. So I think they'll have more incentive to keep them on board for a while.