A while ago I was wasting time on reddit, as you do, and came across an interesting question: “why do employers and just about everyone else make a big deal about language-specific positions and “what language should I learn”, etc.?” The greater context there was that the asker had a pretty easy time picking up new object oriented languages once they got a good handle on one of them, so they were confused about why people seem to think x years of experience in language y were so important.
I have mixed feelings about job postings that require a certain number of years of experience in any particular language. If you understand programming concepts (from low level stuff to how ifs and loops work to higher level stuff like how to keep your core business logic separate from presentation code) then yes, it’s pretty easy to apply those in whatever programming language you need to.
As a bit of an aside I think a lot of job postings are more of a wildest dreams wishlist than a useful description of what’s actually necessary to do the job from day to day. In the context of this particular question, I have a strong suspicion that when most job postings say the applicant needs “5 years of experience with Java” what they actually need is someone who knows Java and has 2-5 years of programming experience.
That said, while most programming concepts are transferable (especially if you’re using languages with broadly similar syntax), you really are more productive with a language you already know well, especially if you don’t have much programming experience. There are weird quirks of languages you may not run into at all until you’ve been working with them for a while, too.
For example, did you know in Java String.substring() used to return a “view” of the original string, not a completely separate string? And that since Java 1.7 update 6 it returns a completely separate string? Yes, that seems really minor but it can cause some weird weird bugs if you change the original string thinking it’s completely separate from the substring. And because stuff like that doesn’t look wrong, it can be absolutely miserable to track down.
Just because I technically can code in languages other than Java doesn’t mean I can do it quickly. When I need to do any front end work I spend a lot of time looking things up because I don’t remember the exact parameters basic string operations take in Javascript. If I had to write Javascript all the time I would start remembering those details, but that’s with a foundation of years of programming experience to start from. If you’re a new dev who just graduated from college/university/bootcamp, you’re going to have a harder time learning a new language because you’re also going to be learning professional programming at the same time.
Which language you learn first also makes a big difference in how hard of a time you have learning to code. In general I think you should start with whatever language lets you build stuff you’re excited about, but I don’t want to pretend all languages are equally beginner friendly either. C and C++ are good for many things but they are not your friends :) Python and Ruby are easier to pick up because they take care of fiddly details like memory management for you, and Javascript can be a good first language because you don’t need any special programs like IDEs or compilers at all, you can write it in notepad and run it in your browser.
So given all of that, why do (some) employers make such a big deal about language specific positions? Because if you don’t already understand programming really well, you need some way to find people who have a decent chance of succeeding in the position you want to fill. Sadly, not all job postings are written by people who understand the day to day work so it’s not unusual to end end up with some poor HR person’s best guess at what’s needed.
“5 years of Java experience” can also be a pretty decent proxy for “actually likes working with Java and won’t ditch us in a year to work in [cool new language of the week]”. Some languages are just not considered cool and plenty of people have a perfectly legitimate dislike of the amount of boilerplate you have to write to make Java do much of anything, so it makes sense to look for people who are willing to work with your tech stack for the long term (or at least the longer than one year term).
Readers, what do you think of stuff like “must have 5 years of Java experience” in job postings?