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I think you're shooting yourself in the foot looking for 'web developer' jobs in the homeland of hipsters. Of course all the postings are going to be for trendy

I think you're shooting yourself in the foot looking for 'web developer' jobs in the homeland of hipsters. Of course all the postings are going to be for trendy technologies. Look for more boring jobs that require web development skills, unless you're really stuck on the title. You know PHP. I did too, once. I made the mistake of taking on a Magento project a decade ago, suffered through it, and I still get hounded by recruiters desperate for PHP developers who know Magento. That fucking platform still powers 99% of the entire e-commerce space; version 2 was released recently and by many accounts it's even worse than v1, which means people who made the mistake of using it are going to need support for it. The demand for PHP developers is still very much there. You know Python. You can get jobs knowing just that. There are lots of relaxed junior-level *-analyst positions in many domains requiring nothing more than scripting skills and a brain, which you clearly have. I see job postings all the time looking for Django devs. Lots of businesses need reporting-type stuff done, business analytics, ETL, that sort of stuff. Shady businesses always want web scrapers written. With 10+ years in web development, you might also want to take a shot at jobs involving web application security-- either securing or breaking it. Just to put it in perspective-- my job title has nothing to do with web development, yet it is an incidentally significant portion of what I do. Best job of my life, and I never would have found it looking for "web developer" jobs, since that's not what they thought they needed when they hired me. Crawl LinkedIn, not Craigslist. All you'll get from Craigslist are couches, crabs, and people who want you to build out scalable PCI-compliant e-commerce solutions with a full complement of product photography for their hobby business for $500, payable upon delivery. And when they sense your desperation, they'll withhold even that until you go away. Best of luck to you.

ryan-allen 8y ago
I think this is good advice. There is loads of work in PHP that require his kinds of skills. You might not go to the local ECMAScript meet up and do a talk about it but it's gainful employment and there ain't nothing wrong with that. I share office space with a company that does SME consulting work and they do heaps of Magento, Wordpress and the like. Everyone's getting paid and nobody is complaining.
t3hprofit 8y ago
This. Don't follow the advice of "Learn {X} new technology". In this day and age, a new language, framework, etc show up every 3 minutes. You may be a bit rusty, but stick to what you know for now. Maybe start a blog about your situation and what you're doing to get back in the game. There are definitely jobs out there that need your skills. Job hunting is usually a numbers game, so keep sending out resumes.
- steve_taylor 8y ago
  React was released five years ago and has been the dominant front end framework for most of that time, including right now.
  - yayana 8y ago
    Dominant in developer/framework Mindshare for five years.. Damn hard to find a company actually using it in many markets for most of that time. At first it was not all that different from node's leadership of frontend thinking, except that it could be used in the browser.. For a past python developer, trying out something like Django a bit with converting a past project would be less work than react for a js developer and probably a good refresher.
    - jomkr 8y ago
      Do Facebook not use it?
      - yayana 8y ago
        Is that relevant to my comment?
        throwaway080383 8y ago
        I believe it is relevant to the part where you said it's damn hard to find a company using it.
muzani 8y ago
Agreed. There's a lot of good frameworks on PHP. There might be less work to develop PHP websites from scratch, but more that involves maintaining an existing system. The unpopularity of PHP actually means there are more PHP jobs emerging. Nobody wants to swap out of a functional old system, but the younger folk are going to go after new, sexy, technologies.
- raziel2p 8y ago
  Even ignoring the legacy systems (Wordpress, Magento...), PHP has made massive improvements compared to other old languages like Python or Ruby. The language features, performance improvements, frameworks and libraries available today makes it 10 times better as a language than 10 years ago.
  - lowercased 8y ago
    Agreed. In 2007/2008, I'd been doing PHP for 11ish years; started in early 96 with PHP/FI, with vb & notes in the early 90s before that. I kept doing some PHP, but moved primarily to spring/java (via grails). enjoyable, learned a lot, but it always felt clunky and convoluted (I never became as proficient as I wanted in that stack). After several years, I 'came back' to the PHP world. A lot of the early warts/problems were still there, but you could avoid them more or less entirely if you chose to build with the new crop of composer packages and psr-compatible frameworks. The speed of PHP7+ is comparatively amazing (which, arguably, shows how 'slow' it was before!). PHP 5.6 (2014) was roughly twice as fast as PHP 5.3 (2009). PHP 7.2 (2017) is roughly 2-3x faster than PHP 5.6. In the 8+ years I 'left' PHP (was still using it, just not as primary day to day), the performance doubled, then doubled again. Still not as fast as 'pure' java/c/whatever, but incredible improvements all the same. Given that the majority of my dev work involves a lot of 'line of business' stuff with a SQL database as a central piece, db queries are almost always the biggest performance issue, the relative speed of PHP vs other stacks was even less of an issue for my real world scenarios. Upcoming experimental JIT stuff looks to make an even bigger improvement in some areas. Some comparisons were from memory, some from https://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/493-php-performance-evolution.html https://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/493-php-performance-evo...
paulie_a 8y ago
Good advice, but honestly I disagree regarding LinkedIn, it's a waste of time. The job listings are junk in my experience. It's for HR to pointlessly spam people.
- daetnyr 8y ago
  It’s good to get connected with recruiters who have connections and positions to fill. Having a recruiter on your side does not hurt.
remoteorbust 8y ago
I agree with Craigslist. It's a cesspool. The paradox of freelance is that generally people treat you better and have more reasonable expectations if they are paying you more.
- spdionis 8y ago
  > generally people treat you better and have more reasonable expectations if they are paying you more This is true in most settings, from office jobs to the service industry. Always good to remind yourself that usually professional respect comes from your salary, not the other way around.
ccajas 8y ago
Oh boy, I've been there with the Craiglist delusionals that you described. He didn't even bother to name the business that he was trying to get built. If he can't do that, he can't be that serious about starting. They state "passion" but no sir, if you don't know how to LLC or register a name, passion is not a substitute for having a clue on what you're doing.

ryan-allen 8y ago

I think this is good advice. There is loads of work in PHP that require his kinds of skills. You might not go to the local ECMAScript meet up and do a talk about it but it's gainful employment and there ain't nothing wrong with that. I share office space with a company that does SME consulting work and they do heaps of Magento, Wordpress and the like. Everyone's getting paid and nobody is complaining.

t3hprofit 8y ago

This. Don't follow the advice of "Learn {X} new technology". In this day and age, a new language, framework, etc show up every 3 minutes. You may be a bit rusty, but stick to what you know for now. Maybe start a blog about your situation and what you're doing to get back in the game. There are definitely jobs out there that need your skills. Job hunting is usually a numbers game, so keep sending out resumes.

steve_taylor 8y ago
React was released five years ago and has been the dominant front end framework for most of that time, including right now.
- yayana 8y ago
  Dominant in developer/framework Mindshare for five years.. Damn hard to find a company actually using it in many markets for most of that time. At first it was not all that different from node's leadership of frontend thinking, except that it could be used in the browser.. For a past python developer, trying out something like Django a bit with converting a past project would be less work than react for a js developer and probably a good refresher.
  - jomkr 8y ago
    Do Facebook not use it?
    - yayana 8y ago
      Is that relevant to my comment?
      - throwaway080383 8y ago
        I believe it is relevant to the part where you said it's damn hard to find a company using it.

muzani 8y ago

Agreed. There's a lot of good frameworks on PHP. There might be less work to develop PHP websites from scratch, but more that involves maintaining an existing system. The unpopularity of PHP actually means there are more PHP jobs emerging. Nobody wants to swap out of a functional old system, but the younger folk are going to go after new, sexy, technologies.

raziel2p 8y ago
Even ignoring the legacy systems (Wordpress, Magento...), PHP has made massive improvements compared to other old languages like Python or Ruby. The language features, performance improvements, frameworks and libraries available today makes it 10 times better as a language than 10 years ago.
- lowercased 8y ago
  Agreed. In 2007/2008, I'd been doing PHP for 11ish years; started in early 96 with PHP/FI, with vb & notes in the early 90s before that. I kept doing some PHP, but moved primarily to spring/java (via grails). enjoyable, learned a lot, but it always felt clunky and convoluted (I never became as proficient as I wanted in that stack). After several years, I 'came back' to the PHP world. A lot of the early warts/problems were still there, but you could avoid them more or less entirely if you chose to build with the new crop of composer packages and psr-compatible frameworks. The speed of PHP7+ is comparatively amazing (which, arguably, shows how 'slow' it was before!). PHP 5.6 (2014) was roughly twice as fast as PHP 5.3 (2009). PHP 7.2 (2017) is roughly 2-3x faster than PHP 5.6. In the 8+ years I 'left' PHP (was still using it, just not as primary day to day), the performance doubled, then doubled again. Still not as fast as 'pure' java/c/whatever, but incredible improvements all the same. Given that the majority of my dev work involves a lot of 'line of business' stuff with a SQL database as a central piece, db queries are almost always the biggest performance issue, the relative speed of PHP vs other stacks was even less of an issue for my real world scenarios. Upcoming experimental JIT stuff looks to make an even bigger improvement in some areas. Some comparisons were from memory, some from https://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/493-php-performance-evolution.html https://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/493-php-performance-evo...

paulie_a 8y ago

Good advice, but honestly I disagree regarding LinkedIn, it's a waste of time. The job listings are junk in my experience. It's for HR to pointlessly spam people.

daetnyr 8y ago
It’s good to get connected with recruiters who have connections and positions to fill. Having a recruiter on your side does not hurt.

remoteorbust 8y ago

I agree with Craigslist. It's a cesspool. The paradox of freelance is that generally people treat you better and have more reasonable expectations if they are paying you more.

spdionis 8y ago
> generally people treat you better and have more reasonable expectations if they are paying you more This is true in most settings, from office jobs to the service industry. Always good to remind yourself that usually professional respect comes from your salary, not the other way around.

ccajas 8y ago

Oh boy, I've been there with the Craiglist delusionals that you described. He didn't even bother to name the business that he was trying to get built. If he can't do that, he can't be that serious about starting. They state "passion" but no sir, if you don't know how to LLC or register a name, passion is not a substitute for having a clue on what you're doing.