[macspoofing]

>This was just a decision made in favor of managers over the poor engineers that will have to deal with maintaining a large Java code base over time.

What's wrong with maintaining large Java code bases? Say what you want, but the language is built for that.

The worst code-bases I've seen tend to come from dynamic languages. Try to maintain hundreds of thousands of lines of python or ruby code over several years, and see how fun that is.

>From a non-engineer view though, let's be real : nobody ever got fired for picking java.

No. That's not a correct framing. Java is one of the few languages that able to strike a great balance between performance, development productivity, 'debuggability", cross-platform support (i.e. works just as well under Windows as Linux), language safety, and library and framework ecosystem. Honestly, it's hard to come up with a use-case where Java isn't a natural right answer.