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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Whereas their salaries are serious money to EY.
I'm curious why they thought EY would be a safer home for them.