> I think you’ve drunk the kool-aid a little.

Don't know about kool-aid, but if you want to do interesting platform work -- on GC, compilers or low-overhead observability -- you could work at Microsoft on .NET, at Google on V8 (or Go), or at Mozilla on WebAssembly, but the truly cutting-edge, state-of-the-art work is done at Oracle on the JDK (and related projects like Graal), which is where I get to lead a project to add delimited continuations and fibers to the JDK. We're obviously keeping an eye on what's going on elsewhere, and while there are certainly great ideas out there (some we're happy to steal, as others steal from us) we look around and don't see similar overall technological leadership elsewhere. That's not to say others won't pick up mindshare or win certain niches, or that technological leadership is the determining factor, but if you're in interested in the technology and familiar with what people are doing, it's hard to deny that Java is ahead of the pack in the technologies I mentioned.

> there isn’t a whole lot of mindshare going towards java these days. At least in regards to new FOSS projects.

I'm not sure your numbers are correct. Java is not the only game in town as it was for a few years in the first half of the naughts, but "not a whole lot of mindshare" seems to be detached from reality. I can't predict the future, but remember when PHP had all the mindshare and totally killed Java? Remember when Ruby did the same? I would like to think that Java still being the leading server-side platform after being killed over and over has something to do with its technical excellence, but I know that's being naive. Nevertheless, wishful thinking on the part of some don't make reality, and usual fluctuations don't make a trend. Eventually, something will kill Java -- or at least mark its true lasting decline -- but it doesn't seem like that something is here yet.

> I can say that my company’s use of java is diminishing rapidly over the last 5 years too.

That may well be, but we're also seeing companies switching to the Java platform in quite significant numbers, in cases where both performance and observability are top priorities. There seems to be movement inside the Java ecosystem (e.g. among the Java language, Kotlin, Clojure and Scala) or outside it (e.g. people switching among Ruby, Python, Node and Go), but we're not seeing any significant shift away (except on the client side, where the browser has won). There are also certain niches, like machine learning, where the Java platform isn't number one, but it's doing much better than Node, Go or .NET.

> Oracle itself is a pariah, the vast majority of the tech industry avoid it.

I'm not a manager, but I'm not sure the numbers support your conclusion. The opinions developers voice on HN and Reddit are... fickle, and don't necessarily reflect market shifts. In any event, the competition doesn't seem to be doing too hot in comparison, either. I can tell you that personally I'm certainly unhappy with some of the things Oracle has done, but at least it's not surveilling on the entire world, putting thousands of small businesses out of business, or getting kids into conspiracy theories. Also, my colleagues are so far not famous for outbursts of racism or misogyny. Now, I admit that’s not exactly high praise, but these days, as far as Big Tech is concerned, that’s not not nothing, either, and I’ll take annoying some other corporations over those any day.