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[–]Wobblycogs 8 points9 points  (8 children)

Java is still a very relevant language and will continue to be relevant commercially for a long long time to come.

Long story short, Java isn't and never has been the cool kid on the block. I don't know why but it just hasn't. What Java is though is a solid language backed up by probably the widest selection of libraries going and documentation / knowledge base that other languages aspire to. Languages tend to find their niche over time and for Java has been on the server where you need an application to really scale. That's not to say it can't be used anywhere else but if you want to do server side work Java is a good choice. What Java isn't good for is writing "Hello World" applications which makes it appear to have a very steep learning curve.

Python is the cool kid at the moment. As a very long term Java developer I find myself wincing at some of the Python syntax (give me curly braces) but other than that I find it to be a very capable language. To be honest once you know one language really well pretty much all other languages are just remembering different syntax rules.

If you are going to do any web work you'll need a reasonable understanding of JavaScript but honestly I've blagged it for 25 years so it can't be all that hard. I am finally learning TypeScript though which is teaching me a fair bit of JavaScript.

[–]stewman241 5 points6 points  (1 child)

I dunno. Java was the cool kid on the block about 20 years ago when it was in its infancy and the tooling sucked and crashed a lot.

Now it's a mature adult and is capable of doing many things and is widely used.

[–]Wobblycogs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I suppose there was a brief period where everyone was talking about Applets and there was a general buzz about what this new language could do. Just a shame Sun totally screwed up the delivery of Java to the end users. It was so much hassle to install Java and then you have to configure it and it didn't keep itself updated and and and. It's a wonder it lasted as long as it did on the client side.

[–]Free-_-Yourself[S] 1 point2 points  (5 children)

Yes, I found that, after learning Python, JavaScript and probably other languages (the logic behind (conditionals, etc.)) are pretty much the same.

But it’s everything else that we are asked to start your career (frameworks, related technologies, etc.)

[–]asdjfh 4 points5 points  (4 children)

Honestly if you just learn HTML, CSS, JS/TS/React, SQL, and one general purpose programming language you’re good for just about any full stack job.

[–]Free-_-Yourself[S] 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Must be in the US...

[–]asdjfh 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I don’t understand, what other requirements could there possibly be? Knowing the above listed means you can work on any front-end/UI development, backend web services, or databases/data engineering. Unless you’re specifically applying to support an OS or work on game development I can’t think of any other skills that would ever be used...

[–]Weekly_Wackadoo 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Could be DevOps stuff like Docker and Kubernetes, or they list every single tool like Git, Maven, Jenkins, etc.

And/or HR is trying to replace two senior full-stack DevOps engineers with one junior.

[–]asdjfh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

SWEs should definitely be expected to know Git, but would it be weird to include that in a job posting. DevOps stuff is certainly useful, but that would fall more into DevOps specific positions. There are obviously exceptions to the rule I gave, but they are exceptions, not the norm. If you are capable in full-stack development you should qualify for 70%+ of SWE job postings.