I've had to use PHP even though I really love Rails because WordPress is built in PHP and a lot of my client work is with WP. It's definitely not elegant when

I've had to use PHP even though I really love Rails because WordPress is built in PHP and a lot of my client work is with WP. It's definitely not elegant when compared to Ruby or Python but it's not as bad as Java. Because you know Python, it won't be hard to pick up but you'll need to accept that you're working with a different environment and live with the tradeoffs. The neat thing about PHP code is that it runs pretty much anywhere. This is not a big deal when you're building one app that is going to be used by a lot of users but it is a big deal when you have projects you're building that are open source and you want to foster a growing community. As others have mentioned, a lot of your sanity levels will depend on what their current code looks like. If it's at a company like Facebook, I'm assuming their code would be at least decent or even nice. On the other hand, it could be a complete nightmare to work with bad code. A different way to look at bad code could be as an opportunity to do a lot of work and make yourself very valuable to the team. It just depends on whether you want to take on that type of role. Now if money and distribution of your code isn't a biggie for you, I wouldn't take the job as you don't want to realize you've wasted a year on something you hate.