It's actually not that rare, in my experience. Job adverts can be quite misleading in this case. Kotlin jobs are usually advertised as Java jobs. For a couple o

It's actually not that rare, in my experience. Job adverts can be quite misleading in this case. Kotlin jobs are usually advertised as Java jobs. For a couple of reasons: Firstly, quite a few large shops have started to use it, but usually due to grassroots bottoms-up activity of the sort that takes a while to percolate through to recruiting departments in distant departments where changing a job req is a heavy process. Secondly, there's really not much incentive to try and change job reqs like that because it would be extremely hard to advertise via job reqs We use Kotlin but you don't have to know it to apply. To a non-technical recruiter or HR department this looks like a useless statement and will frequently get "fixed" to what you "really meant", something like "Java experience is required, Kotlin highly desirable" which might just put off candidates who don't know what Kotlin is or how easy it is to learn. You're just restricting your pool of candidates for no reason in a highly competitive market. Much better to advertise the usage of Kotlin in places where developers looking for new opportunities might notice and leave the job reqs alone, and let Java devs get up to speed in the first few days. For example: https://medium.com/ing-blog/introducing-kotlin-at-ing-a-long-but-rewarding-story-1bfcd3dc8da0 https://medium.com/ing-blog/introducing-kotlin-at-ing-a-long... Edit: To answer your later question, yes, Kotlin goes beyond Java in a lot of ways other than nicer syntax. For instance it has a different (better) generics model, it has far more type inference, it has sealed (sum) types, it has language-integrated coroutines, it has compiler plugins that automate, amongst other things, serialization, it has delegated properties and interfaces, it has type aliases, it has extension functions etc. I suppose a lot of these can be considered "just" better syntax than Java (except for coroutines and generics), but, at the heart of most programming languages is making patterns that are possible in other languages much easier.