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Sun's JRuby Team Jumps Ship To Engine Yard
itwbennett writes "'To be honest, we had no evidence that Oracle wouldn't support JRuby, but we also didn't have any evidence that they would,' said Charles Nutter, explaining why Sun's entire 3-member JRuby team will be leaving the company to work for application hosting company Engine Yard. Nutter called getting hired by Sun about two-and-a-half years ago and being given the chance to work full time on JRuby a 'dream come true.' And said that the decision to leave Sun came down to making sure 'JRuby will get to the next level.'"
I think it was more something like "Engine Yard wants to hire all three of us. Oracle won't give us a yes or a no on whether we'll even be here next week, and the magic eight ball says 'outlook not so good'. Let's take the offer we have in hand where someone in management will at least know we exist."
I worked for a Fortune 100 that took two years to getting around to closing our office--that's how long it took them to notice we were there and bother to send out layoff notices. Between continued employment at a place like that and a place where someone actually wants to employ me, I'll take the latter.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Quite right. In a few months' time they could all be out of a job with no prospects when Oracle has an inevitable cull and eventually realises they don't want them. However, they have the opportunity to jump ship to an expanding company now who will directly rely on and need the technology they are developing. They would be stupid not to jump ship to that in the current climate.
> If there's one thing even slower or more pointless than jvm and ruby,
> it's ruby on rails. I guess someone didn't get the memo,
> but RoR's 15 minutes are up.
To the contrary, people are cranking out new Rails apps at a furious rate, and lots of Java and C# apps are getting ported over to Rails. It's good times.
The Army reading list
...is that now EngineYard has full-time folks working on Rubinious, JRuby, and Ruby 1.8.6. It's Ruby implementation central over there.
The Army reading list
I'll one up that: Based on my experience in several software engineering companies (video games), my policy is now to find a new job ASAP when your company gets bought out, even if they DO say they want to keep you! (That being standard operating procedure -- not hearing that is the equivalent of an immediate pink slip.)
Engineers can only really advance by switching companies. Definitely best to jump ship when some people are talking about you and you have some leverage, no doubt about it.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
But they would be even stupider not to ask for a counter-offer from Oracle before formally jumping ship.
Except they're in the nebulous legal gray zone where the Sun Board has approved the deal, but DOJ & the SEC haven't given their blessing yet. The companies continue to make decisions and operate as separate entities, and people can actually get in legal trouble for attempting to do otherwise.
So... They couldn't go to Oracle and ask, and Oracle couldn't have given them an answer if they did.
In the aftermath of a buyout, three employees trying to jack their soon-to-be-former employer for a raise is a recipe for negative attention.
The thing about the aftermath of a buyout is that the purchaser (legitimately) takes months or years to understand what they've bought, and decide what to keep and what to prune. Unless Oracle bought Sun to get Jruby, then calling attention to yourself by seeking a counteroffer is a good way to move to the top of the "keep or cut?" list, and in a way that makes cutting all the more likely.
And generally speaking, "large, deep-pockets organization(s)" are no more stable than a startup, from the grunt's perspective. At any moment, you're one spreadsheet away from being laid off to improve the quarterly statements.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I used to work with Charlie Nutter and Tom Enebo years ago, when we worked on the same Web team. And I was thrilled to hear when they moved to Sun, really was the best deal you could imagine. Note that JRuby wasn't actually bought by Sun, but remained a separate project, only the developers were paid by Sun to work on JRuby. So I wish them the best as they move to their new digs.
Good luck, guys!
So we take one of the slowest and most bloated virtual machines for static languages, the JVM,
Boy, do you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about! JVM one of the slowest VMs? You need to get your head out of the '90s. It's one of the fastest now. And JRuby is one of the fastest Ruby implementation. (Definitely faster than Ruby 1.8, which is dreadfully slow.)
You're correct that Ruby's dynamic typing doesn't go well with JVM's static typing, which is why Scala is much faster than JRuby. Still, the JVM is so impressive, and Ruby nice enough to work with, that JRuby is still a pretty good idea.