After over 19 years working at Sun, you might think that I’ve seen it all. But last week I experienced a personal “first”: my boss, Rob Gingell, left the company. I was so gobsmacked that I checked back to make sure that this was indeed the first time that this had happened. Of course many of my former bosses have left the company (or, in the case of Phil, been tragically snatched away from us on 9/11), but in every case they’d had the decency to wait until I was no longer working for them.

I’ve never really understood why we’re always so secretive about people leaving companies. (I actually held off writing this piece until Rob had assured me that his mug-shot was on file at his new company.) After all, people come and go for all sorts of reasons, and it shouldn’t be a big deal. Rob, like me, had been at Sun since 1985, and after 19 years it’s hardly surprising that he was interested in doing something new. But we never announce these things, even internally (unless the person is retiring), and I think this has two unfortunate consequences. First, people tend to interpret secrecy as meaning that you’re trying to hide something. (“Oo-er! Rob just quit! I wonder why?! What did he know that I don’t know? Should I be worried?!”) 99% of the time, the answer is, quite simply, no. (And the other 1% there isn’t anything you can do anyway.) Second, by keeping things under wraps we lose the opportunity to celebrate the person’s accomplishments and thank them for their contributions to the company. Sure, a few of us may take them out for a drink, but that’s inadequate recognition for someone who’s touched as many lives as Rob did.

Having violated the taboo, let me say a few words about Rob. I think I first ran into him in 1986 when he was giving a talk on the recent rewrite of the virtual memory system for SunOS (the BSD-based precursor to Solaris). I remember two things from that: his distinctive speaking voice (with the pitch rising steadily through each sentence), and the elegance of the design he was presenting. Over the years we met frequently, particularly after I became a DE in 1991. He was instrumental in the mammoth Sun-AT&T Unix unification effort that became SVR4 and then Solaris; he was a passionate advocate for Java and the community process that underpinned its development; he became the CTO of the software organization; and then in 2002 he was appointed to a newly-created position: Chief Engineer, reporting to the CTO, Greg Papadopoulos.

Rob talked about his new job in an interesting interview with David Berlind of ZDNet, in which he identified his charter as conceptual integrity: “My goal in life is to make sure that all the brains [at the various Sun campuses] are effectively employed and create as much as they can. If only one person creates the ideas, you only get one person’s worth of ideas. I’d much rather have 30,000 people’s worth of ideas. […] I actually hope that it’s never true that the herding cats phenomenon vanishes from Sun. Some of the chaos you’re referring to is what makes us interesting and vital, and keeps us from getting locked into a “we’re doing this because we did it last week” mentality. That level of chaos, while it’s annoying at times, is also fairly powerful because it’s the product of having all those brains usefully applied. Where it’s a negative is when you have no way of arbitrating the chaos […] which I did locally in the software group for many years. It’s a new scope expansion to consider doing it for everything all at once.”

In the same interview, Rob spoke about his vision of how Sun was evolving. “When I say we’re working on our second-generation systems, our first generation was about practicing this [developer feedback] loop with Unix. […] The Solaris applications catalog is essentially 100 percent of any Unix applications that exist. […] When we talk about the next generation, we’re just talking about another instance of this circle that’s based on Java, where the developer number is already at three million. The apps space is only beginning to appear in some areas like your Java phone. […] All of our initiatives around things labeled SunOne are really about translating that into market share for us so that we can start to see this develop into a self-sustaining ecosystem.” It was this vision of Sun’s “second-generation” of Java-centric network computing that led me to come to work for Rob a year ago.

I know I speak for many at Sun when I say, “Thanks, Rob, for your engineering leadership, your inspiration, and your friendship. Clear skies and smooth rides…”