Anecdotally, I see a trend of greenfield projects moving from Java to NodeJS. I can't think of too many organizations that have zero web presence, and basically any modern web presence requires the use of JS, so there's almost always some JS expertise built into the organization.
In contrast, our Java upgrades remain painless. Many of our JS services have been merged back into older Java back ends
That is usually part of the front-end team that don't do the backend SQL work. Tho team that would get assigned the work for a backend greenfield would be versed in Java.
That’s an outgrowth of most projects being quite small. Paying a team or 20+ people to work on one thing is freaking expensive to the point where it needs major benefit or huge company to be worth it. On the other hand maintaining lots of little projects that all automated something can easily pay for a single developer at even fairly small companies. Across tends of thousands of small and midsized companies you get a lot of such teams which grow and shrink, split off and merge over time.
THIS. The product is blended and so must the teams be. Among all the full-stack developers I've worked with, the "frontend" or "backend" designators tended to describe preference or strength, rather than limitation.
I think you underestimate the number of huge companies that see major benefit from large teams working large development efforts.
1,829,875 companies with 5-9 employees 779,922 companies with 10-19 employees 467,634 companies with 20 - 49 employees 170,749 companies with 50 - 99 employees
Of that a few are pure software companies, but it’s far more common to want to automate something. Which often means outsourcing it, but then they simply can’t afford these kinds of large projects.
At the other end only 23,553 companies have 1,000+ employees. Yet even at that scale it’s not guaranteed to have large development teams in house, a single hospital can have 1000+ employees and use mostly 3rd party software with a few generalists to stitch everything together.
Starting from the other end, the Stackoverflow survey has 50% of devs identifying as full-stack. Most surveys have Java as the #2 programming language, where it’s been for the last 20 years. That says nothing about how those devs are organized among teams, but I don’t think it points to such arrangements being “rare”.
I always took that kind of a breakdown to mean most website developers where full stack with embedded etc being their own categories. With majority full stack teams including various specialists as needed, which fits my experience over the last 20 years.
However, Android is Java and is frequently used as a front end. As things grow I normally see teams split by system, so I can see mobile being split off as their own team becoming more common even if it’s the still the minority. That said, it’s teams managing the backend teams which would be considering Java vs NodeJS and based on that 55% I think most teams are familiar with JavaScript.
It's orthogonal to my point though.
Java is typically used in larger or long-lived organizations. It is rare to start new projects from scratch. Most development is maintenance and extension of existing systems. Even if you start a greenfield project, it would be most prudent to chose the same platform and language which is already used in the organization. An alternative language would not only have to be better, it would have to be very significantly better to make up for the overhead and headache in maintaining code in multiple languages - never mind the increased difficulty in hiring and training developers.
Geeks tend to evaluate language based on how appropriate they would be for a greenfield project with no organizational baggage. But this is an extremely rare use case for most business.
HN often has reports about startups rewriting everything from scratch every four months, when a new language or platform becomes fashionable. But this is not the world where most developers live.