[urthen]

In my personal experience I'd say there still is a widespread mindset in our industry that all "real" web development needs to be done in Java. I'd also say that whenever someone says that they usually mean "I'm most comfortable in Java so let's use that so I don't have to learn new things."

I've used both Java and Node professionally, and have in the past few years made recommendations for new projects to be started in both Java and Node depending on their unique requirements. I've even worked on projects migrating existing systems both from Java to Node, and Node to Java.

That said, I do strongly believe that Node is better suited as a language for web-scale projects that deal more with asynchronous requests (such as to DBs and APIs) than doing heavy data crunching themselves. If you need heavy data crunching, Java might be better for you, and there are a lot more available frameworks.

If you're looking for a job specific recommendation, it sounds like that might be partly regional. If you can't find Node jobs in your area, then maybe picking up Java is the right answer for you.

[mrath]

If you are looking for decent paying jobs then Java is probably one of best languages to choose. The JVM eco system is huge and tools are less to none. There are some comments mentioning web development, I would say that is not Java’s strongest area. There are 10x(just a guess) more backend work API, integration etc done in Java today. From what I see there still lot of new Java work being done, while the share has come down recently it is still quite large.

At least in finance domain Java has a quite a large presence and it is growing

[kyawzazaw]

Do you sense the JVM ecosystem slowly adopting Kotlin language as a first class language, especially finance domain?

Also, which companies do you mean by finance domain