Boosting your maven-compiler-plugin to 3.8.0 seems to be necessary but not sufficient. If you're still having problems, you should also make sure your JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to Java 10 (or 11) if you're running from the command line. (The error message you get won't tell you this.) Or if you're running from an IDE, you need to make sure it is set to run maven with your current JDK.