

A Sad Day (Layoffs in Engine Yard's Rubinius team) - luckystrike
http://blog.fallingsnow.net/2008/11/18/a-sad-day/

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ice_man
I find the automatically generated "Possibly related post" amusing: "Engine
Yard Closes $15 Million in Series B Financing" dated July 14, 2008.

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tortilla
Sad, but I'm sure the laid off programmers will have very marketable skills
from their experience with Rubinius.

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davidw
The market for programming language implementors is not a big one, I think.
Not to say they won't find jobs, being smart guys, but they may not find jobs
doing something so "abstract".

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nickyv52
I have a long term Ruby on Rails position where you will develop and maintain
a social network application. This is with a very well known company here in
the Bay Area.I know there have been layoffs so if any of you are interested
please let me know!

Thanks! Nick Vella nick@rgatech.com

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compay
Engine Yard is a good company full of bright people. I worry a little for them
that their business model is based on how complex it is to deploy Rails
applications, and with the emergency of Passenger this problem is starting to
go away.

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qhoxie
EY isn't about solving these issues for people who would have trouble
otherwise. If you look at all the high profile teams hosting with them, it is
clear that most of them could do it themselves or hire competent people to do
it. The difference is that EY does it better and is constantly pushing the
limits of scaling in the cloud - specifically relating it to Ruby.

Passenger is great, but it's not an alternative to hosting with EY.

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callmeed
Interesting. As an EY customer, this isn't something I like to hear.

Was Rubinius a sort of R&D department at EY?

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luckystrike
Rubinius is an open source project started by Evan Phoenix to build a new VM
for Ruby. Engine Yard hired him (and a team) and was paying them for working
on this project only. I guess they wanted the Ruby ecosystem to grow faster
and build a goodwill for themselves in the community. (Or maybe the main
decision maker (Ezra?) is a true blue hacker only who loves good software!)

These layoffs are not as bad a news for a customer. It's just that as a hacker
or an open source adopter, it is a bit of a blow. It is like someone taking
back half the lottery money you initially won. (Hell, it was still a lottery
only.)

There are very few companies (especially startups) who go so far as Engine
Yard does/did in actually hiring people and supporting an Open Source Project
to this extent. And they still haven't completely pulled the plug off it yet.
I sincerely hope Rubinius does become a stable implementation of Ruby, and all
the hard work pays off well for the contributors.

Disclaimer: I don't work at Engine Yard, and am thousands of miles away from
the place of action.

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tmornini
Thanks for understanding, luckystrike.

I was the one that asked Ezra to keep an eye on Evan and Rubinius after
RubyConf 2006. We really felt that the community would benefit from an
industrial strength Ruby runtime, and still feel that way today.

We hired Evan more than 6 months before we received venture funding.

When we received our series A funding, we hired the best team we could get our
hands on and hoped to push Rubinius through to 1.0, which we define as no
apologies MRI parity, as quickly as possible.

Things are good here at Engine Yard. We have a growing customer base, and very
interesting new products in the pipeline. As with all other business in these
times, sharpening the budget just makes very good sense.

We did what we felt we must do to make certain we could continue funding
Rubinius through to completion.

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sabat
Is it just me, or do a lot of these layoffs have an "oh, yeah, us too, we
should do layoffs, yeah!" feeling to them? Why suddenly now?

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johnrob
Wrong question. The right question is why everyone decided to hire so many
people in the first place. Clearly, they were not essential.

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neilc
Hiring only "essential" employees is often not a very intelligent strategy, if
you have the funding to hire more aggressively and the opportunities to use
the employees productivity.

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dcurtis
I kind of disagree with this. I've seen many startups make poor hiring
mistakes that eroded culture, slowed development, and added layers of
management that were unnecessary. All of the hires, of course, were made based
on the theory that the employees could be productive to the organization.

I've never once seen a company with a good hiring strategy for acquiring
employees before actually needing them that worked. The fact that Digg has 60
employees is absurd. What in the hell does eBay do with 13,500 employees? A
4-person startup could rebuild all essential parts of eBay in six months.

Startups have shown over and over again that you can make great use of
technology with very few people. As people are added to the team, especially
in engineering departments, productivity starts to slow. There is a ton of
overhead in integration, teaching and building company processes, and
management.

Employees are toxic.

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sachinag
I'm not so sure that you could replicate eBay (or Digg) with four people. I do
agree that it's harder to maintain culture as you get bigger - but that's the
whole point of management.

We're trying to build a tiny little mini-eBay in a tiny little niche market,
and it's taking us fucking forever to do stuff. The issue is that it's really
hard to determine what's essential - and to get a new seller (and we don't ask
people to leave eBay; we just want them to add Dawdle as a venue), we have to
be better than eBay on all those things that particular user feels is
essential.

That's why Mixx, despite being a nicer community, with all sorts of bells and
whistles, and links on lots of major sites, isn't taking off
([http://siteanalytics.compete.com/mixx.com+digg.com/?metric=u...](http://siteanalytics.compete.com/mixx.com+digg.com/?metric=uv)).
There's a certain je ne sais quoi about a site that determines what makes it
"essential" - and it usually isn't feature equivalence.

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dcurtis
It's hard to filter things to their essential features, but that ability is
kind of what defines a good entrepreneur.

Building those essential things-- those things people absolutely need to use
your service (and maybe to differentiate it)-- and then iterating upwards is
the key. In six months, I think you could replicate the majority of eBay's
functionality with four people.

The things you're discussing are mostly user acquisition problems. That
problem is not solved by hiring more engineers.

