A Sad Day (Layoffs in Engine Yard's Rubinius team)

http://blog.fallingsnow.net/2008/11/18/a-sad-day/

by luckystrike • 18 years ago

39 22 18 years ago

blog.fallingsnow.net

tortilla• 18 years ago

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

davidw• 18 years ago

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".

sabat3• 18 years ago

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?

johnrob• 18 years ago

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

neilc2• 18 years ago

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.

sabat3• 18 years ago

Good point; startups owe it to themselves to avoid corporate fluff.

timr• 18 years ago

That's not fair. Sometimes companies let go of good people because they have no other choice.

ice_man• 18 years ago

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

callmeed• 18 years ago

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

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

luckystrike• 18 years ago

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.

tmornini• 18 years ago

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.

compay• 18 years ago

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.

qhoxie• 18 years ago

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.

nickyv52• 18 years ago

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

A Sad Day (Layoffs in Engine Yard's Rubinius team)

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