Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware. It is considered one of the Big Four technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.
Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. An initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004, and Google moved to its headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. In August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet’s leading subsidiary and will continue to be the umbrella company for Alphabet’s Internet interests. Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page who became the CEO of Alphabet.
Getting a job in Google is a dream for many. If you want to work for Google (or at least for its parent company, Alphabet), it will help if you can code in one of four key programming languages. They’re all pretty mainstream.
In the chart below we’ve plotted the percentage of currently advertised jobs at Alphabet against the percentage of staff currently claiming to work there who mention each language on their public profiles. It turns out most Googlers are all about Python, Javascript, C++ and Java.
This should not come as a surprise. GitHub’s recent State of the Octoverse report had Javascript, Python and Java as the top three programming languages, with C++ ranking 6th.
As with most employers, Alphabet’s demand for programming languages isn’t restricted to each language individually: it typically asks for a cluster of several when it advertises roles – the chart measures the percentage of roles/profiles specifying a programming language that include each one.
The programming language that Alphabet doesn’t use much – surprisingly perhaps – is Kotlin, which Google made its preferred language for Android app development in May. There are a handful of Kotlin jobs on offer, but not many – and less than 0.5% of the total. Nor is Go as popular as might be expected given Google’s suggestion seven years ago that it might be a good replacement for the C languages.
Alphabet hires C++ developers as Google cloud engineers, network and system specialists, security experts and database engineers. Investment banks, hedge funds and high frequency trading funds are also big users of C++ expertise in high-speed trading systems.
Based on our current snapshot, the things that seem to be growing in use at Google are .NET and C#. The platform feaures in a far higher proportion of both in current job ads than on the profiles of existing staff. This is a curiosity given Google’s historic rivalry with Microsoft. However, .NET can be used with Kubernetes, Google’s open source system for automating the deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications, and is used in the fast-growing Google Cloud business, so this shouldn’t be massively startling either.
Top coding languages at Alphabet (including Google)
| Language/Framework | Jobs currently advertised | Existing employees |
|---|---|---|
| Python | 15% | 17% |
| Javascript | 15% | 12% |
| C++ | 14% | 16% |
| Java | 13% | 18% |
| .NET | 10% | 2% |
| C# | 9% | 5% |
| Php | 9% | 5% |
| Go | 5% | 4% |
| Perl | 3% | 4% |
| Html | 1% | 11% |
| Ruby | 1% | 3% |
| Kotlin | 0% | 0% |
| Scala | 0% | 1% |
| Rust | 0% | 0% |
| Clojure | 0% | 0% |
| Elixir | 0% | 0% |
| Haskell | 0% | 1% |