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I was job hunting this year, I'm a long-time PHP developer (since '99).

It wasn't the language, it's everything around it. It's knowing frontend and how it works, it's knowing about cloud/operating systems, databases, 3rd party integration, IAM, SSO and the list goes on.

These skills are applicable everywhere, next to any language. Compensation I was offered revolved around the ability to be non-invasive towards younger teammates and to provide education with emphasis on critical thinking. During the years I've done this job, I learned other languages as well and I can safely claim that initial language one learns has huge impact but it's learning additional skills that makes up for a valuable employee.

In the end, knowing C# but not knowing PHP bears little insight into whether you're capable of listening about a requirement and coming up with a solution that satisfies the need, code it in such a way code can safely die one day and make in such a way that additional people in the team can jump in and manage it.

I also found a lot of job offers and opportunities. My previous engagement was insurtech/fintech, there's quite a bit of PHP used there (and it works well).

Wordpress, Magento, Facebook - these aren't the only places where PHP is/was used, the world we don't hear or read about is larger than the blogo-investo-googlesphere we're used to reading about.

So are you saying that you didn't see a salary difference between PHP roles and C# or Java roles? I've said before that I think modern PHP + tools can be very productive but smart/good developers will find that CV/Salary pressures steers them away from PHP.

> So are you saying that you didn't see a salary difference between PHP roles and C# or Java roles?

No. What I said was that language was not as relevant as the complete engineering ability that makes someone a valuable (financially viable) employee.

> but smart/good developers will find that CV/Salary pressures steers them away from PHP

I never met a person who entered world of IT with the criteria that you highlighted there. My recent experience shows that people enter IT/development based on salary alone, not based on research they conducted taking into account industry they'd work in, language features etc.

If this case you wrote of actually existed, world of software would be a place of much more high quality software and not of "it barely works" projects that resemble Frankenstein's monster.

That's very interesting.

My experience in London/UK market is that offered salaries are based on market rates based on keywords including tech stack. And I know a decent number of competent developers who deliberately moved away from PHP because of the lower offered salaries. It might just be the local ecosystem which imo doesn't really value engineering roles in general

I completely agree that it's not just the programming language, it's the ability to understand and apply concepts that will make a great developer. Furthermore, you're right on the money when it comes to applying those concepts to integrate them into a solution (re: "loud/operating systems, databases, 3rd party integration, IAM, SSO, [etc...]).

I was more focused on where I think one's energies early into their career should be directed if they want the best chance at advancement and integrating those solutions in the corporate space. Yes, those solutions are integrated in PHP for various projects, but not as often in the applications that are running your day-to-day corporate operations.

I've used and developed in PHP for many web projects. I've used and developed in .NET/MVC and Java/Tomcat for many web projects.

I've used and developed in .NET for many desktop/server/infrastructure projects. I've used and developed in PHP for a single infrastructure project, some custom development for pfSense integration (which was horrifying, running as root, hodgepodge scripts).

Objectively, the evidence I've seen, appears to indicate that a developer with skills in any other mainstream language has more opportunities for employment and a greater salary.

Right on the money. There’s a reason PHP shows so high on this list, and e-commerce is always mentioned. Analyses only have access to public sites, and PHP’s niche of blogs and e-commerce have lots of publicly crawl-able pages.

The majority of sites may well be in something else, and the majority of things that people will pay you to code may be behind a login page.

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2021/php/

Still seems to be most popular in France, doesn't appear to be dying off there... Interestingly it's gaining popularity. Curious why that would be.

Many people who learned to code with PHP in the 2000s are picking it up again as first choice for web projects since they improved it so much and websites can be updated and running with a simple `git pull` without restarting any services.

I saw a video not long ago that made me have hope for the future of PHP again -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRV3pBuPxEQ

Symfony is from France.

> This is great, and I'm glad for the PHP developers out there. But if I go job hunting, it's not PHP skills that offer the highest earning potential. At least not that I've encountered.

PHP has indeed ranked close to the lowest in average salary in StackOverflow surveys for years. The amount of templated thrown-together solutions for the exact same site as yesterday with different branding vs. custom solutions probably is the root of this.