Amazon Web Services (AWS), in a hiring coup, this week welcomed James Gosling as a Distinguished Engineer.
Gosling made the announcement in a Facebook post on Monday morning. Gosling wrote, “It’s a time for a shift.” “I’m leaving Boeing Defense (formerly Liquid Robotics), with many good memories. Today I begin a new adventure at Amazon Web Services.
Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels also tweeted a welcome message for Gosling, but didn’t provide any details about the job. Gosling’s LinkedIn profile has been updated to describe his new job as “wandering about at Amazon Web Services.”
Gosling, who was not available for comment at this writing, has enjoyed a vibrant career since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, his longtime employer back in 2010. The former Sun Fellow was briefly appointed CTO of Oracle’s client-software group. He left the company in late 2010 to join Google.
He landed at Liquid Robots in 2011, a manufacturer of “autonomous ocean-going platforms”, which was later acquired by Boeing last year.
In 2014, Gosling joined the platform development advisory team of Java/PHP Platform-as-a-Service provider Jelastic.
Gosling is the one who invents the Java programming language in 1994. He was also one of the most prominent ex-Sun employees to leave Oracle after the $7.5 billion acquisition. Chairman and co-founder Scott McNealy; director of Web technologies Tim Bray; and open source evangelist Simon Phipps were all part of the CEO Jonathan Schwartz.
When asked about Gosling’s latest career move, one Java watcher stated what seems to be a common opinion. “Guys such as Gosling will only stay at a location so long that they’re able do ‘their work’ (whatever it is at the moment). They run into barriers, such as funding, culture, orgs, and funding. They find more welcoming venues and continue to go.
Another said it like this: “The man is semi-retired, and jumping from one fascinating thing to another.”
Stephen O’Grady, Redmonk analyst, suggested that Gosling’s hiring could be about courting enterprise Java customers and leveraging his IoT expertise at Liquid Robotics or simply giving him the freedom to experiment.
“Whatever the truth,” he stated in an email, “it’s an intriguing and high-profile AWS hire, one that will have public benefits beyond what he can technically contribute.”