I have a lot of debates about this with people. One of the most common reasons given for why PHP is so popular is because you can’t swing a cat without hitting a PHP developer. I say thats crap, and that you can swing a whole lot of cats before you hit a halfway decent PHP developer. Good developers who know and want to work in PHP are hard to come by. Consider that perhaps PHP is so popular because it does some jobs really well.
Terry Chay recently made an extremly funny and quite insightful post about Ruby (on Rails) in which he mentions:
“look at the top 100 websites on the internet: about 40% of them are written in PHP and 0% of them are written in Rails.”
Which is pretty interesting. To me, it says that PHP is a pretty good scripting language to be getting stuck into, that its something that you should be using if you want to develop web applications that are used by hundreds of thousands of users across the world.
I’ve met developers who consider PHP to be second-rate and who are ‘embarassed’ to admit competance in it on thier CV. Developers who just plain dont want to do PHP because it would ‘damage’ their career prospects to have used such a poor quality language for too long. I say this is crazy-talk and that the sort of numbers that Terry mentions (which I appreciate may not be accurate to three decimal places) just shows that PHP is a language that is being used in environments that other more traditional OO scripting languages are too delicate for. I wonder what sort of percentage of the top 1000 traffiked sites use PHP, or the top 100,000?
To me, PHP seems like its a stronger career prospect than ever.
Are you attributing the success of those 40 or so websites to their being written in PHP? Maybe their developers or marketers had good ideas — hitherto better than anyof the sites that happen to be made from Rails — and chose PHP to implement them. (I’m not railing — pun intended — against PHP; I love it!)
In other words, it’s a correlation only.
I’ve just been looking for a job in Melbourne, Australia. Although being *very* strong in PHP (and I’d consider myself one of the ‘good’ PHP developers), I’ve decided to take a job not doing PHP.
Whilst I’d love to be doing PHP, everywhere that I interviewed at indicated I’d be working mostly with people who are not ‘good’ PHP developers – largely they’re guys with little experience, and it seems very little community exposure.
I’ve set my salary benchmark, only to have people turn around to say ‘oh, but there are other people willing to work for less than that’. That’s fine, they get what they pay for (and I think they will eventually realise that), but it’s frustrating. Instead, I’m getting about a 30% higher salary to stay away from PHP completely.
Employers just don’t seem to take PHP developers seriously. To me, *that* is the problem. Whilst it’s great experience to have, as long as the recruiters don’t recognise the value of a good PHP developer over a bad one, there’s little prospect for the future.
I suppose if I were to persevere, I’d be able to find the elusive dream PHP development job, but I’m sure as aware as I am that they’re few and extremely far between. Or perhaps that’s just the state of the local market, and your market is much more balanced – if so, let me know where I can sign up.
“I’ve met developers who consider PHP to be second-rate and who are ‘embarassed’ to admit competance in it on thier CV.”
people showed this kind of attitute has no real unstanding about software developement, they mental still stucked in they junior developement stage.
when i was started programming, i often heard those people shout: “people do not know assembly language are suck. or real programmer use xxxx (you fillin whatever language you like)”.
i just do not unstand why those people feeling embarassed to admit competance in PHP, probably they realy not that competance in PHP.
I can’t view the posts below the main picture with konqueror 3.5.5. (If you should care about konqueror
@Thomas – thanks, I’ll look into it
Is PHP a good job prospect? Well let’s see. At php|tek last week, I was hunting for PHP people. My company is hiring. I didn’t find any, though. Yes, at a conference full of nothing but PHP people, I couldn’t find anyone that was a good lead to hire.
Why? Because everyone I spoke to was also looking to hire PHP developers. The demand for good PHP people is very high right now. One could debate why, based on installed base, language quality, phase of the moon, whatever. It doesn’t matter. The bottom line is that if you’re entering the IT market right now, there’s dozens of companies small and large who need good strong PHP people. It’s a good market to be in, if you’re looking for work.
@Davod – I’m not attributing those websites success to PHP. I’m saying that PHP isn’t just the ‘long-tail ‘ of websites, the PHP Nuke and phpBB sites, its a proven tool for some of the most popular websites in the world and that developers who want to work on these successful sites should be looking at PHP.
@Joshua – You make a very interesting point. Unfortunatly I can imagine that your experience is not an uncommon one. I suppose that as there are fewer ‘great’ PHP developers, the market for them is also smaller, which just feeds the ‘PHP sucks’ cycle.
One of the outcomes of the ’swing a cat, hit a PHP developer’ mentality that is around is that employers feel they can get away paying PHP developers less. I guess its up to us to persuade them that for less money, they’d be getting someone without the experience and community awareness. Hopefully things like the Zend Certification program will help this, and also help the employers sort the wheat from the chaff.
@Joshua – This is mostly my experience in Italy: shops looking for php devs are small to very small, and they focus on cheap labor. In fact they’re confusing php developers with apprentice web designers.
Imho they will be bitten hard in the future, but, as a matter of fact, your best bet as a pro php developer is either abroad, or working for a company living on php, not single applications (zend, yahoo, ez.no, etc…)
@Larry – the market migth be good in the US, but it still is quite hard for people from abroad to get a HB1 visa sponsorship
PHP developers are highly wanted in Vietnam as well although our local market is very small. But like other countries, companies that recruits PHP developers is almost small. But they are getting bigger because a lot of offshoring companies from Japan have established their business in Vietnam for the recent years.
However, good hiring trend can not come at a surprise because PHP is one of most popular web technologies in the world. Web is hot, right? Also, almost web applications are lightweight, affordable, mass friendly. PHP is currently the best tool for such tasks.
I have seen a lot of impressive growth in PHP community for recent years. There are more and more mature and professional PHP developers, lot of solid frameworks, lot of high quality php applications, lot of outstandingly successful PHP projects (digg.com, facebook, flickr, friendster…), lot of improvement in PHP core engine and all of those get more respect from the software development industry and enterprises. People understand that PHP is stable and powerful enough to be used in any mission-critical application that fits its scope.
I, you and the others know that when people believe in PHP developers, their competency and their flagship tools, they will offer more jobs.
However when PHP community is growing, other communities aredoing so. To PHP developers, becoming more and more professional is only way to gain competitive advantage
Marc Gear’s Blog: Is PHP a solid job prospect?…
…
[...] On his blog today, Marc Gear asks if developing PHP makes for a solid job prospect for the future: Good developers who know and want to work in PHP are hard to come by. Consider that perhaps PHP is so popular because it does some jobs really well. […] To me, [Terry’s quote] says that PHP is a pretty good scripting language to be getting stuck into, that its something that you should be using if you want to develop web applications that are used by hundreds of thousands of users across the world. [...]
As pointed out in The Journal of Adrian’s excellent article about hiring Perl devs (http://use.perl.org/~Adrian/journal/33295), by definition, good developers are fully employed, thus it takes a very attractive job offer to get their attention. That’s what I’ve seen here in Texas: a growing collection of attractive offers. That wasn’t happening as little as three years ago. PHP is a pretty mature language having solidified tremendously over the past few years. PHP is a relatively immature professional job market, having evolved out of haphazard freelance undercutting turmoil. But employers are more interested in creating real jobs for PHP with good salaries and benefits, in order to draw the attention of the skilled PHP dev. That is evidence that PHP’s future is bright. Because it is so hard to find PHP devs with a professional background, many companies are very hush hush about the hiring process. The want to protect their “sources”. Work on changing that. Awareness that there are good jobs out here for PHP devs is the only leverage we have to persuade average PHP developers to become exceptional PHP developers, which solves everyone’s problems. I realize that filtering out the underqualified applicants is a painful and wasteful expense for company, but making the PHP job market less invisible is the only way this situation improves.
From my point of view the lack of good php developers is (also) caused by universities and other IT university grade schools that ignore the very existence of php. What languages are students given an option to learn? It’s usally java, c/c++ and other but not php.
The weak point to PHP developers that is widely exposed to the world for recent years is some sort of culture: get things done quickly and somewhat carelessly. As the result, many PHP applications is constructed in a messy way, hard to maintain and get feelings that the developers behind them lacks of software engineering education. I dont want to mention about kind of academic education because people can get educated from various sources if they really want.
We can not blame people from other shops (Java, C#) for thinking that way about us because there is little PR news or community activities shows that PHP developers have strong background in software engineering. Of course, software engineering is not all in software development but at least it shows some sort of professional thinking and organized way of doing things.
We need more framework-based applications to prove that there is a wide adoption of MVC architecture, design patterns, teamworking, seperation of concern or role… that fit into enterprise-like software development culture. We need more academic-like articles about refactoring, OOP, design patterns, software architecture, unit testing.. We also need more thought leaders whose voice can be listened carefully by other people coming from enterprise software shops. PHP world has some stars but some stars can make a sky. We need a lot of stars to make people think that stars in PHP world is common thing and they can recruit some good guys to make a strong team without thinking about additional training.
Traditionally, we developed softwares and kept silent about how we had done it. The questions was that how many people in PHP world did a primarily design before coding something or how many people spent some times to draw some marketing pictures like that: http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/docs/tutorial/doc/Overview9.html
Zend framework: No. SolarPHP Framework: No. CakePHP Framework: No
Getting thing done quickly is good but under some circumstances, we need do it in more polished and expensive way. Sound like marketing but what we expect if it can increase our market value?
I know there are a lot of very good php developers. And if you can’t find good one nearby its time to think about outsourcing.
PHP Must be a solid job prospect as a ‘bad’ php developer (then) i was able to earn £3k a month, that occurred 3months in a row after they recommended me to each other.
It had nothing to do PHP code, more high knowledge of basic requirements to launch new websites, expanding and implementing suggestions (what they did not think of!)…. What gets you the job not quality PHP! its quality user experience.
Saying that, I’m now undertaking revision for Zend PHP 5 Certification. Soon I can offer great websites, with quality code!! lol
PHP5 Certification Blog: *New
http://www.is-hacked.com/blog
Some comments complain about people undervaluing PHP, thats not their fault its down to your bad self promotion. Every time I bid for a project in person they think im some kind of genius! As you can tell by my grammar and spelling that’s not true.
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