"Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

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volomike
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"Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by volomike »

Oh, you'll love this article if you love PHP.

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.c ... p-won.html

Don't be disappointed with the blog platform he chose, or the fact that he didn't customize his XHTML like he should have, such as widening the text on the page. No -- this cat is an important guy. The blogger is: Eric Ries, Venture Advisor at the world-famous venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and co-author of several books.
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by alex.barylski »

I agree with every point he made.

While a language will attract a certain type of developer, I disagree with any notion that PHP applications cannot be designed properly. It's just more work and effort and experience required on behalf of the lead developer.

There are a core set of principles anyone can follow in any language that will result in higher quality software.

That being said, PHP is such a saturated market, why would anyone hire YOU when Joe Blow is willing to work for $5/hour and has a proven track record as well?

Clients don't care about source code quality, not until their developer leaves out of frustration with their own mess and they are forced into hiring someone new. When that someone new comes in, looks at the code and says: "We need to rewrite" or I'm leaving, they get abetter sense of quality control.

That needs to happen several times before anyone begins to appreciate the time and energy it takes to write quality code, even as a developer it takes dozens of projects under your belt before you begin to appreciate best practices, patterns, etc, etc.
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Eran
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by Eran »

Though he supported PHP, I don't agree with most of his points (and I commented there, I wonder if he'll approve). If you know the right tools, PHP can be very performant and maintainable. As an aside, URLs obviously do not have to map to php file names, and you can control the URL scheme as you wish. It seems he has some ways to go with PHP.

@PCSpectra:
Where do you live that the market is so saturated? every where I look people and companies are looking for high-quality PHP developers, and not some Indian at 5$ per hour (no offense, just making generalizations). Some understand that to you get what you pay for and are willing to pay the price. The others can talk to us again in a year, when their facebook clone is still incomplete though their developer got paid the entire 400$ for it.

You just need to explain better the benefits of your skills, in a way clients can understand (saving more money long-term, easier adaption to change and progress, maintainability, security, scalability etc etc)
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by Luke »

I agree with just about everything he said. I will say without any hesitance, I like python better as a language than I do PHP. He put it better than I can, there are a lot more reasons than syntax to pick a language. PHP makes sense for a lot of reasons. The number one for me being the ridiculous amount of ready-to-go code out there. There simply is no other language that can compete with PHP when it comes to that (at least in the web development world). Also, as an average small business, it makes sense to choose PHP because it's much easier to find good PHP programmers than it is to find good python programmers, and they are generally cheaper, at least in my experience. His final point was RIGHT ON. Your average html/css guru, even if not a programmer, will possess enough PHP knowledge to build anything they need, and often a guy like this is all a small business needs for their "web guy".
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by volomike »

Not to sound contrary, and I guess I don't really want the competition -- to let this little secret out the bag -- but my experience has been that there's plenty of elbow room in the PHP field. There's a lot of good work opportunity out there for it -- but maybe not if you work for someone else. You have to seek those clients yourself. And I've read several posts on the web about managers desperately needing *good* PHP devs, which often means someone who either knows CodeIgniter, CakePHP, ZF, or at least MVC, understands the importance of handsome URLs, uses good folder organization for projects, sticks with naming conventions set by the team lead, appreciates the importance of an ORM and a DB class abstraction library as well, and can sort of meet a deadline, draws XHTML better than a guy in the 1990's, knows jQuery and AJAX, and understands the importance of source control. Some managers have been so fed up, looking for someone who knows PHP, MVC, an ORM, jQuery, and AJAX -- they insist they'll just abandon PHP and go off with some other language. (But they'll be back, won't they? haha)
Last edited by volomike on Fri Jan 16, 2009 9:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Luke
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by Luke »

They certainly will ;)
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by volomike »

I felt for sure someone would be PM'ing me by now, going, "Sssshhh, volomike. Don't tell anyone that secret. What, are you crazy?"
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by alex.barylski »

What I would like to know, is where are you guys advertising yourself to find clients who demand MVC, Zend, CakePHP, etc?

I get contacted mostly (actually entirely) through DN...people see my signature, send me a request and expect a quote. The budgets are rarely over $3K USD and expected delivery in month. While I can usually do 2 a projects month, it requires me to work essentially around the clock and I'm getting tired of it.

Ideally I'd like to find a project and have a big enough budget to hire someone to help me with the development. I had an opportunity like this years ago but I blew it, and wanted to do everything myself -- learning experience I suppose. :)

I usually have to use several open source applications, tie them togather as a single login, rebrand the interface to make them appear all the same and ontop of that add new features when requested. Needless to say, it's a nightmare as every project has different standards, DB manipulation, etc. Some use weird templat engines, others use PHP as temlates, others still use DOM. Argh...

Having people find you on message forums is the worst way to go.

I am genuinely curious though, as to how you find contracts that are actual businesses, not virtual businesses that need facebook clones, dating sites, etc. Those always seem to be the lowest budgets and most frustrating.

Cheers,
Alex
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Eran
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by Eran »

to find clients who demand MVC, Zend, CakePHP, etc
Nobody demands this (aside from some exceptions), and I usually don't tell the clients such technical information as it is really of no interest to them. What I tell them, is that I will develop a very maintainable, well documented, secure, extendable application. Depending on the client, I might talk some more about coding standards (just the concept), using well tested and proven open-source solutions (very rarely naming specific frameworks), that should enable the end result to be easily supported easily by any professional PHP developer in the future (in case I'm not available for support).

Recently I had a meeting with a potential client which was actually asking technical questions, seeing as he already had his website developed once and got a terrible product as a result (ton of bugs, security issues, slow loading and non-standards compliant HTML). The company that developed for him used a custom framework they built themselves about 5 years ago, and I could go in detail on how bad it was. But this is rare, in general its just enough to state the advantages - if the client understands, and wants to deal with a professional, then he'll also accept a higher rate.

What you definitely need to do is find sources to generate leads. You can't rely on projects finding you, you have to have several channels to get them. Local listings sites, freelancer sites (the higher quality ones), some partnerships with local design firms/web development firms looking to subcontract and so forth. A good portfolio (and I mean - a professionally designed one) could help as well (we are currently working on that angle, which is not covered).

Another important note is to always strive for a face-to-face meeting - it increases the percentage of a successful pitch, and also required for a real requirement gathering session for an accurate proposal.
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

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Well, it's not that my clients demanded Zend, Cake, CodeIgniter -- I actually only had one that paid me on the clock in 2008 to learn ZF and to try to use it -- but it's just that the articles on the web regarding managers who need a PHP guy explain the type of guy they need, and often you get the idea that they are very structured and need an MVC kind of guy. Most of my clients just want the code readable, not spaghetti code, follows the Separation of Concerns to at least page templates and the rest, and meets or beats deadlines and yet produce something functional.
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by volomike »

PCSpectra -- as I have heard over and over again on freelanceswitch.com, and which I'm actually working right now to take this advice to heart (even if it kills me and depletes all my funds), you REALLY need to have passive income in this business so that you're not working around the clock, killing yourself, or asking for too much per hour that you price yourself out of the available market. And by passive income, I'm suggesting something that gets you $1000 per month while you sleep, minimum. That's what I'm working on now. My partner has invested $12K, and I've invested at least $10K so far, and I hope to get it conquered here by Jan 31, if it doesn't kill me first, and right now it's killing me.
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by alex.barylski »

What I need to do is find me a full time, in house development position, so I can clock in at 8AM and leave without fuss at 3, 4, 5 or 6 at the latest.

10-6 would be a perfect shift, monday through friday. $20/hour and I'd be happy so long as there were no NCA's or some stupid thing that prevented me from working on my own thing in the evening and weekends.
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by volomike »

PCSpectra wrote:What I need to do is find me a full time, in house development position, so I can clock in at 8AM and leave without fuss at 3, 4, 5 or 6 at the latest.

10-6 would be a perfect shift, monday through friday. $20/hour and I'd be happy so long as there were no NCA's or some stupid thing that prevented me from working on my own thing in the evening and weekends.
Uh oh. I think you just triggered my inner beast...queue the death metal...

That's one thing I hated about working in-house. They say 40 hours on the contract, but then expect 80. If you get upset about it, they point to the door and say, "There's the door. You decide."

The other thing is that I haven't been to a job yet where they would let me just nonchalantly walk in la-te-da at 10am, even if I wanted to leave 8 hours later. Instead, the guys that get promoted always show up at 8am or 8:30am. It's like flex time -- yeah, flex your a-- in here at eight! Well, when you show up at 8 or 8:30am, and they ask you to stay late, that's one heck of a long day and the managers don't care.

Next comes the performance review. What a worthless bunch of smurf. I mean, after getting 10-15 years of these, you can practically write one in your sleep. And often you are your own, sharpest critic, but still it's not good enough. And then you have managers who are morons with these, who are younger than you, who want to get ahead, so they show that they are straightening out their own staff or something. In my case, I had a younger guy who misinterpreted what HR said about the review process. He swore that every review had to have something negative in it or it would be rejected by upper management. I went to HR and found out that this was not the case at all. So, for about 2 years before I finally threw my hands up and quit, my manager was giving me negative reviews that were really reaching. I also love how you get some kind of nit-picking that you can't fix because it happened like 8 months ago.

Next comes the noise. Some managers think that programmers, project managers, business analysts, and sysops need to communicate more. So, they give everyone smallish desks and half-wall cubicles. I'm sorry, but I can't work in that kind of situation anymore.

Next comes the office jokes, the office politics, and the constant seeing of one another for more than 5 years. That starts to wear on you, especially if you think the people you work with are lazy morons.

Next comes the pay. They work you three times harder occasionally and keep three times of that income you just brought in for them. On your own, when you work that hard, you keep that pay.

Next comes the promotion. They always play the same game at company after company. They withhold your true salary for like one or two years and give you a reduced salary until they trust you. Once they find they can trust you, they give you the amount they had budgeted for you. But once you make that amount -- that's it. After that, you only get a 2% salary increase, if that. I've worked at several companies and they keep playing this game over and over. And the only way to beat these odds is to move into sales or to quit and start your own company.

Next comes the programming language. You come in the door as their PHP and MySQL or PostgreSQL expert, and a year later they tell you that the whole project is going to switch into using PHP on the front end as the mere templating engine, or the V and C of the MVC, and then J2EE on the backend and that they want you to start taking Java classes. Or, worse, they think you already know it because you are a "programmer".

Next comes the DBA. In some companies, the database is Oracle, and it's managed by a pristine set of fine gloves pulled from a door and worn by a highly-paid DBA who like flies in from Singapore or something to touch that database and install that schema for you, or to tweak it. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but you get the point. And often you get a DBA who reviews your table schema and thinks that EVERYTHING must be in Sixth Normal Form, which really only gives you faster writes, but not faster reads. I've seen DBAs being praised up and down, but when you get a table schema from them, it fills an entire wall and everything is taken to like Sixth Normal Form. Time to smack your head on the wall. Like no one ever heard of the reasoning why denormalization is good for some of the table schema? But anyway, the other problem is that you can't take that Oracle development database and twist it one way one day, another way another day -- not without going through an aggravating middle man (or woman). And often there's a lot of crazy garbage in the existing Oracle tables that you just have to live with. And once Oracle has established its roots in an office -- there is no removing it. You can argue until you are blue in the face that PostgreSQL is the best thing out there, but upper upper management at the corporate HQ just don't understand something so powerful that comes for free -- not while golfing at events sponsored by Oracle or by vendors that work only with Oracle. At best, you might be able to bring up some rogue PostgreSQL servers to host your stuff for production needs, but then walk that data over to Oracle as the reporting database (data warehouse).

Next comes the security audits. A lot of companies are required to do business continuity auditing, which means documenting yourself out of a job, and then data security auditing, which is a nerve-wracking mess of security improvements at first, but then a painstaking log taking process after that.

Next comes the many hats. Sometimes you go in as the Senior Dev, and they make you the Senior Dev + Sysop + DBA + Guy Who Cleans The Server Room + Guy Who Fixes The Clogged Toilets At Night With A Wrench + Facilities Management Guy (AC, Heating, Power, Telecom, Etc.). At least -- that's what happened to me and it drove me nuts until I had to just say ENOUGH!!! and I walked out.
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Eran
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by Eran »

woah.. some pent up aggression.. ;)
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Re: "Why PHP Won" -- By A Venture Capitalist Advisor

Post by volomike »

Ha! Just a little.
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