I think it depends what kind of work you do, if it’s primarily single page apps with a Go API, or a more traditional web app. You may have slightly more verbose code setting up types etc, but you gain a ton productivity-wise from things like:
- incredibly rich and robust stdlib
- really, it even has hex dumping!!
- a lot of things literally everyone needs are standard (good http client etc)
- better third-party package quality on average
- static typing (obviously)
- less time reading package docs and due to tooling
- simple package system (no need for manifests)
- simple & obvious public/private interfaces via lowercase and uppercase
- normalized code, all Go code effectively looks the same regardless of author
- less time wasted waiting for installing / deploying 250mb of node_modules
- built-in test framework (no need for something like Mocha etc)
- built-in benchmarking
- built-in templating
- better error handling, explicit and forces you to consider fail points
- better stream implementation with io.Reader / io.Writer and friends
- cross-compiling makes for easy binary deploys
- less indirection for publishing code (no extra registry step)
- verbose but easy to read, no guessing, it’s very explicit
- less fragmentation (callbacks, promises, async/await, …)
I personally find it much more productive, it may take a bit of getting used to – so I wouldn’t judge the productivity right off the bat, give it an honest try for a few projects.
Go has fewer third party packages, but they’re generally much higher quality, and very normalized thanks to gofmt and testing being standard. You don’t have to deal with 150 test frameworks or a wide variety of coding styles (typically pretty unreadable in JS IMO).
What you won’t find is something like Rails (at least that I’m aware of) for more traditional apps, but for single-page apps (what I typically work on) it’s fantastic.
For work that goes “beyond” web apps, like event processing pipelines and so on, I would strongly recommend not using Node. IMO It’s very hard to produce a production-ready robust program in Node, as someone who used it for ~5 years.
The one notable strength (could be considered a con as well) is the lack of thread synchronization in Node since it’s an event loop. In practice it’s not too difficult to write thread-safe Go (or “concurrency safe” as most Go people would prefer to say), however that is an additional layer to worry about. With that said, it also makes it trivial to scale your program to any number of cores.