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 &quot;as niche&quot; as clojure. If you look at a broad indices --<p>1. At Tiobe, it is now at #42. It was language of the year in 2009 and has been slowly moving down<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tiobe.com&#x2F;tiobe_index" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tiobe.com&#x2F;tiobe_index</a><p>2. At redmonk programming language rankings, it has been hovering around #15 for more than a year<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redmonk.com&#x2F;sogrady&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;19&#x2F;language-rankings-1-16&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redmonk.com&#x2F;sogrady&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;19&#x2F;language-rankings-1-16...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redmonk.com&#x2F;sogrady&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;14&#x2F;language-rankings-1-15&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redmonk.com&#x2F;sogrady&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;14&#x2F;language-rankings-1-15...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redmonk.com&#x2F;sogrady&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;01&#x2F;language-rankings-6-15&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redmonk.com&#x2F;sogrady&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;01&#x2F;language-rankings-6-15...</a><p>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.<p>dice.com<p>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&#x27;t mean there will be golang jobs.<p>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&#x27;t necessary bank on it becoming hot in another 5-10 years just because it has been around.