You are looking at a narrow slice of technology companies in SF. This is not representative of a general trend. I will add that you are right, it is not "as niche" as clojure. If you look at a broad indices --
1. At Tiobe, it is now at #42. It was language of the year in 2009 and has been slowly moving down
3. Look at jobs on dice.com same number of jobs for golang and clojure. I have been tracking them occasionally and they seem to around the same since last year.
dice.com
Your use of Docker as a datapoint is interesting, while it is written in golang, far more people use it as a sysadmin tool. So why is that a factor for golang usage? That is a general issue though, lot of infrastructure might be written in golang (and should be) but that doesn't mean there will be golang jobs.
As for taking 10+ years to establish mainstream, things move faster nowadays so unless there is a established or rapidly growing platform exclusively for golang, I wouldn't necessary bank on it becoming hot in another 5-10 years just because it has been around.
1. At Tiobe, it is now at #42. It was language of the year in 2009 and has been slowly moving down
http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index
2. At redmonk programming language rankings, it has been hovering around #15 for more than a year
http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2016/02/19/language-rankings-1-16...
http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/01/14/language-rankings-1-15...
http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/07/01/language-rankings-6-15...
3. Look at jobs on dice.com same number of jobs for golang and clojure. I have been tracking them occasionally and they seem to around the same since last year.
dice.com
Your use of Docker as a datapoint is interesting, while it is written in golang, far more people use it as a sysadmin tool. So why is that a factor for golang usage? That is a general issue though, lot of infrastructure might be written in golang (and should be) but that doesn't mean there will be golang jobs.
As for taking 10+ years to establish mainstream, things move faster nowadays so unless there is a established or rapidly growing platform exclusively for golang, I wouldn't necessary bank on it becoming hot in another 5-10 years just because it has been around.