Are there really that many php jobs floating around?
I'm certainly not seeing it.
There are a tonne of 1-click-wordpress-for-$10 companies out there, making $10 websites using it... sure, and certainly, plenty of people use it as a blog; but is there really a professional path for a php developer?
There's no where near the interest in it that there is in engineers using say, java or C#, or heck, even javascript.
I mean, I'm totally down with looking up composer and php classes if you're curious to see what 'modern' php is like, but I certainly couldn't come up with a good reason to do it other than curiosity.
There's plenty of php work. I don't have that language on my resume, I don't seek such jobs, but there are just sooo many of them that 5 of my previous 7 years of employment with 4 firms, probably 10 contracts --- all PHP.
It's just like "alright that's fine". Maybe there's so many of them because my high falutin snobby peers are simply too good for dirty php. Who knows?
You don't have to work for wordpress.com, though. For example, I do some PHP coding for a media company, which also happens to use Wordpress - WP with redis caching can run a big site also. So yes, there is still php work floating around. Incidentally, their internal tools (content auditing, SEO, ...) is also being done in PHP...
Not arguing, just saying that for example London continuously offers lots of good php contract opportunities. Day rates are slightly less compared to some other tech (mostly tech used in finance), but still decent. It is still very popular in media, e-commerce, publishing, with digital agencies and in various other fields.
Most people don't actually know that php powers such a large portion of the internet, because globally there's waning interest in php (http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/PHP.ht...) and it's generally dreaded by developers (http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech...).
In all seriousness, why would you get into php at this point?
Do you want to go and work for Wordpress.com? (I mean, heck, they're building node sites now (https://developer.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/the-story-behind-...).
Are there really that many php jobs floating around?
I'm certainly not seeing it.
There are a tonne of 1-click-wordpress-for-$10 companies out there, making $10 websites using it... sure, and certainly, plenty of people use it as a blog; but is there really a professional path for a php developer?
There's no where near the interest in it that there is in engineers using say, java or C#, or heck, even javascript.
I mean, I'm totally down with looking up composer and php classes if you're curious to see what 'modern' php is like, but I certainly couldn't come up with a good reason to do it other than curiosity.