
Sun's JRuby team jumps ship to Engine Yard - abennett
http://www.itworld.com/business/72663/suns-jruby-team-jumps-ship-engine-yard
======
psranga
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.

~~~
jshen
It seems that EY is going to focus on jruby instead of rubinius.

~~~
jamesbritt
Where in the world did you get that from?

~~~
gaius
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.

~~~
gaius
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
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
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.

~~~
daeken
It's a completely different problem set, a completely foreign codebase, and a
completely different platform entirely. In addition, it's not their baby;
would you like it if your company decided you're going to work on a competing
project to the one you founded, while you're presumably working on your
project in your spare time?

They made a perfectly logical decision.

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

~~~
bhrgunatha
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
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.

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

