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PHP Shops

Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2015 10:26 am
by Wolf_22
Apologies in advance if this post comes across as off topic in the wider sense, but I'm curious about your guys' opinions of PHP being used in the professional realm...

I currently work in Higher Ed (a state university in the United States) and I've been employed professionally since about 2003 (I started my career off in an internship during my undergrad studies doing lots of CSS / JavaScript / PHP web stuff, spent a year at a data center doing mainframe work via JCL and COBOL--long story but it didn't last because I just sucked at it--and now I'm back at my Alma Mater as a programmer analyst doing lots of enterprisey things but mostly in CSS and PHP land with general application / vendor management / programming support stuff).

Throughout my entire professional career, I've never really worked in a strictly PHP shop. They just never seem to exist, have enough stability to hire at decent rates, or else find my experience levels as being inadequate (which I can understand and appreciate given the level of competition saturating the niche today). However, the irony in this is that I seem rarely have problems being hired into positions that I have hardly any experience in. For example, the mainframe job I mentioned above: I got in the door of that place for no other reason than having a few credits listed on my resume about having had an online "teach yourself course" I took for COBOL development. And the job I have now I think I was originally hired for to do Java development--something I merely indicated as being interested in during my interview when asked about it...

But for my PHP experience? The thing I have the most experience in? I've only had 1 job in it my entire life for that and it lasted only 1 day because of contractual issues I stumbled onto with the shady employer I had that time.

I mean, it's like PHP just never has any kind of accessible, stable establishment for developers of that technology. I guess some of it is due to the time the other languages have had to mature and become entrenched into a majority of the markets. I also get the impression that many old-school developers tend to frown upon PHP due to thinking it has all sorts of problems as a programming language that they never had to worry about with other languages--maybe they're right?

What are your guys' thoughts about all this? Is PHP simply going through some growing pains and making its way into the kind of stable deployment that most shops expect from other languages / technologies or do you think it's falling out of favor and suffering from continual decline as a technology most employers are okay with having in their shops due to either technology shortcomings, old-school self-efficacy issues, etc.? Maybe I just have my own shortcomings when it comes to PHP, too...

Re: PHP Shops

Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2015 10:42 am
by Celauran
I've been working for a webdev shop that uses PHP as its primary backend language for three years now, and was doing PHP work in-house for a telco prior to that, so my experiences have definitely not matched yours. That could simply be a question of us being in different markets. I have heard that a sizeable chunk of the US Midwest is predominantly .NET. Take a look at PHP jobs in Boston, for example, and you'll see it's certainly thriving in other markets.

As for PHP itself, it does have a bit of a bad reputation -- and deservedly so -- but has been improving by leaps and bounds since 5.3, so the last six years or so. People who have not worked with it recently probably still think of it as it was circa PHP 4 and would look down on it, treat it as a toy language, etc for that very reason. Another problem, I suspect, is the sheer number of people who claim to know PHP. On the one hand, you're going to get shops that see PHP devs as a dime a dozen, easily replaced, and will remunerate accordingly. On the other, you're going to have people who followed a handful of outdated tutorials, aren't really conversant in modern PHP or OOP methodologies, and are filling some of these vacancies. Add in the online freelancing race to the bottom and it's no surprise not everyone takes PHP seriously.

It's not the prettiest language, not by a long shot, but it is absolutely capable, has been steadily improving, and with the huge number of sites running on it and hosting providers supporting it, it's not going anywhere soon.