eWEEK readers weigh in on Sun Microsystems' woes and the reason Sun is laying off over 6,000 employees. Is Java to blame? Some say inroads from other languages and application development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails could further Sun's demise. Others say never count Sun out.What is a Java developer to do?
Sun Microsystems began letting people go as
of Jan. 22 in the first wave of layoffs that are likely to affect up to 5,000
to 6,000 employees. Many of those released, according to employee reports, were
coders.
My colleague, Chris
Preimesberger, reported that layoff notifications were sent to about 1,300
employees as part of that action. And reductions were made across all
levels, including vice presidents and directors, Sun said.
Despite the economy being a major factor leading to this carnage, folks are
looking for who else or what else to blame for this mess. Some mention the
company's "NIH (not invented here)" attitude, while others single out
Java and Sun's inattention to complaints about Java's complexity, which opened
the door for newer, more developer-friendly languages to come in. Fair points
both.
Said one person who commented
on Preimesberger's Sun layoffs story:
BTW the engineers are not blameless
either. Like many successful companies used to be a lot of NIH attitude. That
has changed. OpenSolaris is evidence of that. But is it too late?
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