Google search is a bunch of C++ code by circumstance, I'm sure it could be a bunch of Java and do just as well. A lot of Google's other properties are Java-based, so yeah. I haven't found a major difference in compensation between competent people who know different languages. Compensation bands at most companies are almost always tied to experience and role rather than language skills.
Google's use of Java came at enormous cost and aggravation of legal settlements to the tune of nearly 9 billion dollars on the line, however. [1] They won, but it would have had ugly implications for all of the rest of software if they had not. That was eleven years of legal wrangling where we were all wondering what the devil the outcome would be and for a while it was pretty ugly. The ultimate supreme court decision came as a surprise to many. Would you rather in their position ever do that again, especially in light of their new pay for play yearly subscription licensing scheme per computer for usage? [2] It's extremely limiting and costly for any organization to be tied to Oracle's product at this point.
As for salaries when looking at the data I stand somewhat corrected, you're probably right on compensation based on experience, too. It looks like the top three averages on the latest survey I can quickly find are Rust, Go, and Scala. [3]
> Google's use of Java came at enormous cost and aggravation of legal settlements to the tune of nearly 9 billion dollars on the line, however.
Google's use of Java in Android. I can't claim to know the exact details of how the company reacted to the lawsuit internally, but I will point suggestively at the fact that Google is still running most of their Java code in production and continues to write more, and their support for Java on Android stagnated at Java 8-ish and Kotlin is now heavily promoted as the language to write software for that platform.
