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Top 5 Programming Languages to Get a Software Developer Job at Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

javinpaul on February 08, 2020

Disclosure: This post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided i...
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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

There is a slight chance to get a job as Java Developer in Google but that's very rare unless you are like Josh Bloch (author of Effective Java) or Doug Lea (co-author of Java Concurrency in Practice).

That proposition seems absurd to me.

Google has 100.000+ emploees and Java is in fact a major language at Google.

Do a LinkedIn search for people working at Google and who have Java in their skillsets and you will find lots of them.


More generally, in my opinion, if you have mastery in any programming language and you want to apply at Google, Facebook and the others, just do it, apply.

They are desesparate for candidates.

The only thing in the way is that their hiring process is highly bureaucratic and absurd, so you should prepare for that.

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javinpaul

@jean , this is true that if you are a genius then you can get into Google with any programming language, there is no stopping that. There is also not that they only work with Python, they work with almost every programming language including Haskell. The article is about top programming languages which give you the best chance to get a job on tech giants. So, with Python, you have a lot more opportunities than Java, but yes, you can also get a Job with Java but you need to really good at that and wait your opportunity.

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Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

Thanks for clarifying out.
You are 100% right that investing in Python is a great idea, I have no doubt about this.

I guess I was just adding that if you already are skilled, you can also apply to Google immediately. Google has 100.000 employees, and unless you have a very low bar for what it means to be a genius, not all of them are geniuses.

They are good developers and that's enough. So if you are a good developer, you can apply.

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Jean

@javinpaul , if you want to mention @jmfayard you need to use his tag ;-)

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Glenn Carremans

Indeed, I also would like to add that if you look at the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) source code then you can see that all the existing packages (Settings, Launcher, ...) are still written in Java, they haven't transferred to Kotlin.
Java is still a big language in the Android ecosystem, however it is moving to Kotlin with newer projects but still lots of legacy projects or massive projects in Java.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

Android is special, Kotlin is especially successful there because Java the Android way is bad.

But Java at Google is a big thing
Java is major language for google Cloud cloud.google.com/java/
Google has arguably the best styleguide for Java
google.github.io/styleguide/javagu...
I'm just scratching the surface there.


And my larger point remains.

If you are very good at whatever programming language, and you want to apply at Google, just do it.

What matter are your programming skills and they are like 90% independant of your language of choice.

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Vicente G. Reyes

Hi @javinpaul , your article has affiliate links and violates article 11.3 of the Terms of Use

If a post contains affiliate links, that fact must be clearly disclosed. For instance, with language such as: β€œThis post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided in this article.”

This is not the first time a moderator has called you out about affiliate links.

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javinpaul

Sorry, I just forgot to put the disclaimer. It's there now.

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Vaibhav Khulbe

Agree with your list of languages! Also, The Complete JavaScript Course: Build Real Projects by Jonas Schmedtmann is so great! I recommend anyone who wants to start learning JS to purchase that course. πŸ’―

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javinpaul

It is indeed, big thanks to Jonas

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Jukka-Pekka Keisala

Java and C# are still the relevant languages if you want job in big tech.

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Elias Groll

And they are both great languages looking at their type system, tooling, consistency ...

Java is actually a very good choice for the backend even for new projects today.

We chose TypeScript because we wanted to work in the same language in the frontend and backend.

95% for the time that makes you super productive, while sometimes you notice it is not as beautiful as the widely adopted ones and sometimes you spend days debugging some frickely dev tool written out of direct need by the creator which in the end does a regex replace in js source code :D

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javinpaul

true. Banks use C# heavily for creating desktop GUIs.

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Muhammad Hamza Hijazi

I think you have underestimated the power of JavaScript.

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Christopher Wavrin

Completely agree.

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javinpaul

No, not really, its actually one of three of Big 3 league of programming languages, which includes Python and Java apart from JavaScript.

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John Peters

Without respect to targeting the companies you mentioned, we see jobs in Minneapolis surprisingly heavy on Java (Best Buy, Wells Fargo and Target) C# is 2nd (many mid sized companies), followed by Python (United Health).

Front End is a mix of Javascript, and Typescript (as it gains popularity)

PHP is here but is dying, just like Cold Fusion did a few years back.

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Elias Groll • Edited

As an Ex-Googler, I can not confirm (for Google).

Java, C++, TypeScript, Python, Go ARE currently the main languages at Google.

The purpose of each language is more or less:

Java -> business logic
C++ -> high performance stuff
TypeScript -> frontend
Python -> Machine Learning, test and build scripts, legacy Youtube code
Go -> infrastructure and build scripts

In the long term...

...they want to move away from Python (to Go) for scripting, because it was hard to maintain on scale

...they want to move away from C++ (probably to Swift or Rust), because it is hard to maintain and they find the community toxic (they did not want to adopt their suggestions)

...they want to move away from Java to Kotlin (because of license fights with Oracle)

They rarely use but love Rust and Dart.

PS: I did leave this August but I had a chance to talk to their Devex lead on an internal event and asked exactly this.

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Calvin

Great share

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javinpaul

thanks

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Darko Mens

Good to share

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javinpaul

thanks