17 ms·

2020's fastest-rising tech jobs? Programming language PHP leads the way

247 points by mg 6y ago

zach_garwood 6y ago
Will PHP for food
- PTOB 6y ago
  ... and certainly not for pleasure.
mg 6y ago
There is a lot of good things to be said about PHP. Personally, I do not go along with the typical critique about it. Which usually points out edge cases of PHP's behavior which never have been a problem for me in real life. At Gnod, we are heavily invested in PHP. And it continues to look like that was a good choice. What I would like to see discussed more is PHP's decision of not having an import system but to instead use a "namespace" directive in included files. This puts the burden of avoiding name conflicts on the included file rather then on the including file. While in Python and Javascript it is the other way round. Which in my experience makes things more logical and requires less tooling for an enjoyable coding experience.
- Buttons840 6y ago
  I don't know PHP very well, and don't understand what you mean. Are you saying if I write a library in PHP it's my responsibility to avoid name collisions with future user's code (some of which might not yet exist)?
  - hibbelig 6y ago
    It’s similar in PHP and Java: you use the reverse domain name as a namespace.
  - mg 6y ago
    Exactly. You are supposed to chose a name for your namespace that hopefully nobody else ever used and nobody else will ever use. If you write a class "Http" you might start your file Http.php with namespace Buttons840; class Http { ... So a file that includes your Http.php can instantiate the class via $myHttp = new Buttons804\Http();
  - cutety 6y ago
    Also, unfamiliar with PHP, but a few years ago I somehow ended up maintaining/managing one or two reasonably trafficked Wordpress sites that some (untechnical) friends put together, so every now again I get to learn how weird some shit in PHP is. And it’s that time again, because the comment about name conflicts was confusing as I could’ve sworn that during couple times I’ve had to actually poke around PHP code I saw it had namespaces. After some quick googling though, I was able to confirm a) PHP has “namespaces” and b) they seem to work like most other “features” (i.e. not like you’d expect if you’ve programmed in anything but PHP) [1]. However, C has the a similar convention [2] (though the convention is — as far as I’m aware — for the sake of maintainability/readability as the compiler has no problem telling the difference between to things named the same, the person reading it probably will. While, as I understand it, PHP will just overwrite anything with the same name in the file/lib you include). It seems like PHP is heading in the right direction, but I have no idea why anyone would pick it up or start anything new with it these days, I don’t care how well done and the nice and new stuff is, it’s the decade of utter mess it’s built on top of that has uninterested me. Don’t get me wrong, since “acquiring” the Wordpress sites I’ve gone from a blind PHP hater, to at least understanding/appreciating it (but still won’t actually touch it with a 10ft pole). PHP is brain dead easy to deploy and scale up, compared to ruby/python/node (which aren’t _that_ difficult to deploy), PHP is basically the web equivalent of a static binary, in that you can just drop in and it’s basically ready to go. PHP also actually really fast, it’s seriously impressive how fast it can render WP pages especially when you consider the absolute spaghetti/thrown together/clusterfuck code it’s running — Wordpress itself is pretty yikes from the code I’ve seen, but the plugins, Christ, the 50 million sloppy buggy poorly coded plugins — PHP can absolutely run laps around other a decently coded site in other languages (at the cost of having to use PHP I guess ). [1] https://kornel.ski/en/phpns https://kornel.ski/en/phpns [2] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/404613 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/404613
- n42 6y ago
  you're aware of use directives, yes? use My\Full\Classname as Another; https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.namespaces.importing.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.namespaces.importing....
pavel_lishin 6y ago
Weird. I wonder if a major piece of software released a new version that required more work to update existing software?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mtnGoat 6y ago
  Magento, maybe. But I don't think it haa has the user base to drive numbers significantly.
otar 6y ago
It's not a surprise at all. Firstly, PHP has always been around, WordPress based websites still have like 1/3 share of all existing websites. Secondly, in the recent years it got a very mature language, got loads of improvements and performance optimizations. With PHP 8 being planned to be released by the end of this year, it will be another major step forward. Thirdly, Laravel, Symfony and other open source stuff are awesome. I think if PHP does a major comeback as a decent platform for development and somehow gets rid of the undeserved reputation, those PHP devs who stayed with PHP and didn't switch to RoR, Django, Node or other platforms will be winners, including me :)
- altdatathrow 6y ago
  > somehow gets rid of the undeserved reputation That reputation is a competitive edge for companies and people who embrace PHP. They get shit done for the business and grow revenue while the rest of the tech community is rewriting basic tooling for the 50th time in Rust on a Kubernetes-powered back-end with a React front-end powered by a GraphQL API layer.
  - keanebean86 6y ago
    But the new stack is 12% faster!!!!* *We didn't re-run benchmarks after fixing edge cases
  - johnnycerberus 6y ago
    I understand what you are trying to say but Kubernetes and React complement services written in PHP, the former can deploy and orchestrate them while the latter offers an option for SPA apps written in PHP. Also, Rust when written where it should be written, can enhance PHP services that require fast and secure components. But yes, trying to replace what PHP is good at (serving content) with Rust is not really the best thing to do.
    - chrisweekly 6y ago
      "SPA apps written in PHP" huh? that sounds like a contradiction in terms.
master_yoda_1 6y ago
A bogus report.
- mtmail 6y ago
  Any insight why or how the report is bogus?
- archgoon 6y ago
  Perhaps. What is your reasoning or evidence?
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    When you get a report of something reasonably stable, like the job market, with many changes greater than 100% upwards or 50% downwards, it's automatically suspicious. It's even more suspicious when there are multiple non-niche categories with near 1000% or more of change. But then, if this happens at some time, this year is the best candidate. I'm personally hold any conclusion for when I see independent confirmation.
    - AaronNewcomer 6y ago
      There is one big change that happened recently that could explain this as well. I never posted my PHP jobs on indeed. We always used glassdoor and LinkedIn. Now that indeed has purchased glassdoor and all of those job postings automatically go to indeed that could explain a huge rise in jobs there when in actuality there was always this many jobs.
iainctduncan 6y ago
I suspect this is driven by the fact that a boatload of small companies suddenly had to get their businesses online in a hurry. By number of websites and e-commcerce platforms for small businesses, PHP is massive. By amount of use in +$1M ARR established tech companies, it's miniscule. Covid no doubt drove a lot more of the former this year.
- mtnGoat 6y ago
  Can you provide evidence of this claim that profitable/large companies don't use PHP? Or just parroting unfounded php hate.
  - coding_lobster 6y ago
    I wouldn't say it's unfounded but anecdotal. And I wouldn't necessarily call it "hate" either. PHP definitely isn't one of those technologies that you see often on job listings of major companies - sure they might use it for some things such as blogs but it's rarely part of the stack of their staple products. The question isn't whether they use it but to what extent and in what products.
    - AaronNewcomer 6y ago
      On a quick search of PHP skills wanted on LinkedIn jobs I found the following large companies looking for it: Apple, Cloudflare, Vimeo, Box, Slack, Tesla, Etsy, Wayfair, Shopify, Facebook, Etc
      - sroussey 6y ago
        Clearly WordPress and Magento based businesses. Add in Facebook, Weebly/Square, and you realize that PHP probably drives more page views and powers more domain named sites than any other.
        spdionis 6y ago
        How are Vimeo and Slack Magento or Wordpress businesses? Etsy also most certainly does not primarily use those.
AznHisoka 6y ago
I am not sure what methodology they are using but to have an old language like php rise that much in popularity makes me think something went wrong with their analysis.
- johnnycerberus 6y ago
  Languages evolve and PHP did it and still does. PHP is as old as Java. Haskell is even older. In the category of PHP, Java and Haskell we pretty much rehash the same language features with some minor twists in new languages. Hardly we get new features that make an impacts like in the case of Go's goroutines or Rust's borrow checker. The problem is the runtime of the language, on which PHP, the language, runs. That could be easily improved on porting the language to a VM like Facebook did with Hack or to something like GraalVM. Runtimes over languages.
- brlewis 6y ago
  There are 55k openings on Indeed for React jobs and 8k PHP jobs. When the absolute numbers are lower, there's more opportunity for high percentage growth, which is what they used to rank them.
  - drbojingle 6y ago
    React is a library for a language that no one can avoid for front-end development. PHP is a language among many languages which can be used on the backend. JS, Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Elixir,hell even Perl has a web framework. Not really a fair comparison.
    - brlewis 6y ago
      I'm not trying to be fair to the languages. I'm trying to be fair to the people looking at what skills are in high demand.
5cott0 6y ago
ZDNet? C'mon hackernews.
Wronnay 6y ago
I switched from PHP to TypeScript and then Kotlin because in my area companies moved on from PHP to newer technologies. (And I am not the only one, I know lots of people which switched from PHP to other languages) That's probably the reason for a pay rise - many developers switched from PHP to other languages and now companies which still use PHP have to pay more for the few PHP developer
darthrupert 6y ago
Bullshit.
nickthemagicman 6y ago
PHP got way better with version six and seven. I would avoid Jobs maintaining legacy PHP 5 or earlier like the plague.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- otar 6y ago
  PHP 6? :) It never got released...
  - nickthemagicman 6y ago
    Oh haha, I jumped on board at 7. Well that skilled release just means it's like night and day from some of the 5 stuff I see.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
johnnycerberus 6y ago
I'm an experienced JVM developer (mainly Java & Scala) and I had to accept a freelancing project in which one administration component was written in Laravel, a PHP framework. To be honest, the codebase was pretty clean, I could easily understand what's going on, I've used phpStorm as my IDE since I'm used to the feeling of Jetbrains tools. Managed to hack and do the changes in just one week without any prior PHP knowledge. Would I build something new with PHP? Now, I wouldn't. It is not that bad as a language to hack on Wordpress or small websites with Laravel but beside that, it is hard not to choose JVM or Node as platforms for your future projects. Maybe a PHP implementation built on GraalVM will enable PHP to call into JVM libraries. GC and other things will be provided for free, though I think it will be some work since the majority of PHP is native code and its syntax is quite messy.
- qsort 6y ago
  As a relatively inexperienced JVM developer I pretty much share this view. It's true that PHP isn't PHP 4 anymore, but everything else moved forward as well, Java 11 is a fine language that I have few complaints about. Since you mentioned GraalVM, I'm also pretty excited about the Graal nodejs runtime. I'm a fan of using JS/TS for quick projects, and unifying the runtime would be huge, I hope it will continue to be supported.
- sroussey 6y ago
  PHP doesn’t need GC, unless you have some long running process which is generally quite rare.
artiscode 6y ago
I don't find it surprising at all. Almost 17 years ago I got into programming thanks to how simple and easy PHP was. Last time I wrote PHP was back in 2013, however I do not hold any grudges. Low entry barrier in learning the syntax, setting up a development environment, and testing it by typing a filename in the URL, how cool is that? It seemed super cool to me as a tech savvy teenager. I was able to start making money from odd programming jobs just six months later since PHP was in high demand.
webel0 6y ago
The tone of this article (plus my experience on indeed) suggests that a lot of these roles are for larger companies, not for little companies who are suddenly online and need a FT/PT web dev. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a shift in job listing behavior that caused a sudden influx of php job listings on indeed. So it isn’t as if the jobs didn’t exist before, they just weren’t posted on Indeed. The salaries discussed (77k) doesn’t suggest that a surge in demand is pushing up pay.
k__ 6y ago
Lately I get all of my projects directly from customers who approach me first and these project have nothing in common with the stuff I find on those job boards or get offered by recruiters. The projects I get directly are of much higher quality that the public offers, but I also ask myself how much such numbers reflect reality. I mean the dark figures could be totally different.
arnvald 6y ago
Aside from PHP itself, the headline drew my attention: > 2020 was a good year to be an entry-level candidate for technology jobs Not sure what's others' experience here, but from what I hear in various markets (mostly within EU) is that fresh grads generally struggle this year, no matter the technology. Companies put hiring on hold and if they resume it's primarily for more critical roles (read: senior positions); it's harder to get a job or even internship as a junior developer. Am I in some kind of negative bubble?
- bigdubs 6y ago
  Depends what area companies operate in, but where I work (https://blend.com https://blend.com) we're doubling the team again this year and are starting to hire new grads again. Data point of one obviously.
- maxlamb 6y ago
  I assume this quote is US centric, so yes right now there is probably a substantial difference between US and EU in the demand for entry-level developer jobs (that pay a decent wage).
- nefitty 6y ago
  Junior roles are really cheap, and the quality of what many people are achieving continues increasing. I think it has to do with the by dance of self/directed learning resources and improvements in boot camps and other programs.
- lewishogan 6y ago
  My experience has been fairly matched towards yours, I'm a recent Computer Science graduate who's been told a fair number of times that a lot of places just aren't sure if they want to be hiring at the moment.
vorhemus 6y ago
It's a simple question of mass market: How many companies need (and are willing to pay) performance optimized C++ services? And how many need a plain old website and a simple admin interface to add some text?
AndyMcConachie 6y ago
Proving once again that there are only two kinds of programming languages. Programming languages that everyone hates and programming languages that no one uses.
okareaman 6y ago
Are people who write Excel macros real programmers? Do Powershell or Bash scripts count? Is PHP a terrible language? These seem like not smart questions that language snobs like to ponder. Real programmers use Haskell I guess. I recently ran across this article about why you shouldn't hire .NET programmers that really rubbed me the wrong way. https://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-net-programmers/ https://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont... I'm fluent in many languages, like most programmers, and use the right one for the job.
adamredwoods 6y ago
I use it every day and I'm not a fan. Normally I'm language agnostic, whatever your infrastructure supports, I'll adapt to what you use. The largest problem with PHP is how objects use arrow notation, arrays use arrow notation, strings use dot concatenation, and variables use dollar notation. Then I switch to JS or Java and it's all different. As far as the stack for FPM and process managers, I think it works well, but I do enjoy the elegance of Node's event-driven environment.
- tonymet 6y ago
  that’s the largest problem ?
- tasuki 6y ago
  > The largest problem with PHP is how objects use arrow notation, arrays use arrow notation, strings use dot concatenation, and variables use dollar notation. I think those are PHP's smallest problems. Semantics more important than syntax.
irrational 6y ago
Is PHP on a path to become the COBOL of this century?
- greyman 6y ago
  No, it will stay, since a lot of projects are written in it, also new ones. It will stay "forever" like C or C++.
  - tasuki 6y ago
    I don't get the "no" part: I think you're in perfect agreement with "irrational". There's heaps of COBOL that's very much staying. People are getting hired as junior COBOL developers in 2020.
    - dataqat 6y ago
      "no" meaning no one is writing new programs/apps in COBOL, only maintaining old ones. "stay" meaning people will keep launching new programs/apps in PHP going forward.
  - setr 6y ago
    I mean, COBOL is in the same boat -- there's too much code written in it to outright kill it. They still update the language standard today (2014). The main migration argument I see is usually along the lines of "50% of all COBOL progammers today will be DEAD by 2025!" Rather than about technical/financial merit (anyone willing to migrate on those grounds, and believed it was even possible for their infra, will have already done so)
user2834 6y ago
Needed a new job this year. I looked for a job in Elixir and couldn't get hired. Expanded my scope a bit and got hired for JavaScript and PHP in my highest paying job yet. Not exactly my favorite languages, but hey, it's what the market wants to pay me for.
- tasuki 6y ago
  I used to write PHP. While the language itself is atrocious, the surrounding ecosystem is pretty good. How are you finding your job?
threesmegiste 6y ago
I like these kind of news. However hipsters jumping on new buzz word language or tech. Evolution is slow. C c++ java php will be here always. Dont jump on inner solution languages of big tech companies.
- Existenceblinks 6y ago
  The visibility of web industry is only "playing" territory of hipsters echo chamber. And corporations "get it", they create "developer advocate" (modern salesman and brand ambassador), and free review from developer clubs. Fantastic.
bavell 6y ago
Just landed a contract to upgrade an application from Symfony 3.4 -> 5.2 and PHP 5.6 -> 7.4. I've gotten a lot of work from my experience in PHP (where I started in webdev) but personally prefer working with Node and Typescript these days. There's just so much PHP work out there it's hard to avoid!
- ukyrgf 6y ago
  Same here. Everytime I get a chance to breathe I get another lucrative "can you come fix this legacy php app?" request even though I have a day job making new angular / .net core applications.
  - Aduket 6y ago
    Where are you located exactly?
moigagoo 6y ago
Holy cow, where do I apply for junior enterprise architect?
bluedino 6y ago
PHP is to the web world what Visual Basic was to the desktop. Anyone can create a program with it, cheaply and easily. You end up with a lot of terrible code this way. And as the years went on, the products matured into something decent that you COULD write recent code in, but it usually didn’t happen. It’s a good sign that a project will be a terrible mess if it’s in PHP or VB, but a delightful surprise when it isn’t.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
egsmi 6y ago
I was super excited about the idea of AutoCAD being listed as normally us non-web engineers are left out of “tech” but there are some screwy things with these rankings. For example, many of the CAD postings are like this one, https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=8cdc0a90d2325177&from=serp https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=8cdc0a90d2325177&from=se... Where CAD = computer aided dispatch, not computer aided design. I have a hunch whatever code they used create this wasn’t vetted too closely and therefore this should not be trusted.
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  This was my take as well. Over 850% growth is huge and I couldn’t find clear data, then other data they’re presenting doesn’t seem very high quality either.
zackmorris 6y ago
I've been programming for over 30 years and PHP is still my favorite language because it's the least-worst (compared to all the others). It's really easy to point out the biggest flaws in each language: C++ - too complex/brittle, template hell which can't be solved on any practical timescale Javascript - stuck at the dead end of the async branch which we later learned was an evolutionary dead end, can only approximate functional programming but at its core is brittle and impossible to future-proof Ruby - too opinionated, solves the easiest problems with syntactic sugar but doesn't touch the real conceptual challenges of imperative programming in any meaningful fashion C# - too much like Java, inherits all of the flaws around null for example Java - solves the programming problems of the 90s that we later learned were better solved by JIT compilers, immutable data and such, it's biggest flaw being that it's object-driven instead of function-driven Rust - the highest expression of imperative programming, whose problems are better solved via immutable, declarative, data-driven and functional programming using copy-on-write Python - killed by the version 2 to 3 transition, unfortunately never really found clarity around string handling, cute at first sight but painful to use beyond a certain level of complexity or code size Perl - perhaps the most adventurous language in the 90s for blurring the lines between all programming paradigms, but succumbed to not having a single source of truth in its style or conventions (I want to love it as much as PHP, but it's write-only nature will forever limit it) Lisp - best language conceptually but unfortunately write-only because it clings to old ideas like abbreviations and byzantine academic abstractions that we've now learned are anti-patterns (the assembly language of functional programming) This list grows forever, with each new language having a very specific/acute kind of shortcoming which profoundly limits some use case. Which is why I'm especially fond of PHP not trying to be the best at anything. It's the only language I know of that is one conceptual step away from all the others. We can tell C++ or Javascript programmers that PHP is the same but with a $ in front of variables for string interpolation. Shell scripters recognize everything it does immediately. Now PHP does have a lot of problems, the largest being that it's starting to succumb to design by committee and cargo culting. I have not been especially happy with the direction it's gone since PHP 5 and classes. There are some small wins like ternary "?:", but for each of those, there are major flaws like "\" in namespaces. Great shame has befallen PHP at times. But I know of no other language as forgiving, or that tends to "just work" in a REPL, or that has such a vast system library built in. I often find myself thinking in PHP and then having to translate whatever crappy language or framework I happen to be using that day. As far as the future goes, I would very much like to see PHP incorporate some of the newer declarative and data-driven methodologies that have sprung from languages like MATLAB and Julia over the last 10-20 years. I'm not especially happy with TensorFlow because the forest of elegance is lost in the trees of byzantine concepts like with Lisp. But I really think that if PHP skipped over SIMD and went straight to MIMD with with some kind of simple, easy to understand vector handling that didn't break convention, and could be executed synchronously in parallel across many cores, it would really have something. I think this could combine many of the advantages of how Python is being used for data-driven research, without the friction that Python introduces. I could see something like this eventually replacing React/JSX if it also got browser support. Writing this out is kind of hilarious and you can laugh if you want to. I agree that PHP is nowhere near ideal. But I know exactly what I need to get real work done on a daily basis, and PHP is the only language (by a wide margin) that even comes close to giving me the leverage I need across many disciplines of computer science.
aphextron 6y ago
What exactly is a "junior enterprise architect"?
- sosilkj 6y ago
  agreed. can someone explain what this role is? seems to pay extremely well for a 'junior' role. fta: "The national average salary for this role is $144,752 and job listings for these roles have grown 278% over the past year."
yuy910616 6y ago
800% of 10 jobs is 80 jobs.
OCISLY 6y ago
people are leaving so number of untaken seats is increasing
megous 6y ago
PHP was always a pleasure to work with, but I also like C, so your mileage may vary. :D
pachico 6y ago
I really can't stand another thread about how PHP was in the past vs now it is now, or about how popular it is or how was designed. Please, let's move on, it is really time to move on :)
nidaye999 6y ago
Goods
chrshawkes 6y ago
The numbers are BS and most likely related to lots of freelance programmers laid off in the pandemic. If you look at the overall jobs for PHP on Indeed, it's less than years ago and on a steady decline for over 5+ years. It's a dead end language in the USA.

247 points by mg 6y ago

zach_garwood 6y ago

Will PHP for food

PTOB 6y ago
... and certainly not for pleasure.

mg 6y ago

There is a lot of good things to be said about PHP. Personally, I do not go along with the typical critique about it. Which usually points out edge cases of PHP's behavior which never have been a problem for me in real life. At Gnod, we are heavily invested in PHP. And it continues to look like that was a good choice. What I would like to see discussed more is PHP's decision of not having an import system but to instead use a "namespace" directive in included files. This puts the burden of avoiding name conflicts on the included file rather then on the including file. While in Python and Javascript it is the other way round. Which in my experience makes things more logical and requires less tooling for an enjoyable coding experience.

Buttons840 6y ago
I don't know PHP very well, and don't understand what you mean. Are you saying if I write a library in PHP it's my responsibility to avoid name collisions with future user's code (some of which might not yet exist)?
- hibbelig 6y ago
  It’s similar in PHP and Java: you use the reverse domain name as a namespace.
- mg 6y ago
  Exactly. You are supposed to chose a name for your namespace that hopefully nobody else ever used and nobody else will ever use. If you write a class "Http" you might start your file Http.php with namespace Buttons840; class Http { ... So a file that includes your Http.php can instantiate the class via $myHttp = new Buttons804\Http();
- cutety 6y ago
  Also, unfamiliar with PHP, but a few years ago I somehow ended up maintaining/managing one or two reasonably trafficked Wordpress sites that some (untechnical) friends put together, so every now again I get to learn how weird some shit in PHP is. And it’s that time again, because the comment about name conflicts was confusing as I could’ve sworn that during couple times I’ve had to actually poke around PHP code I saw it had namespaces. After some quick googling though, I was able to confirm a) PHP has “namespaces” and b) they seem to work like most other “features” (i.e. not like you’d expect if you’ve programmed in anything but PHP) [1]. However, C has the a similar convention [2] (though the convention is — as far as I’m aware — for the sake of maintainability/readability as the compiler has no problem telling the difference between to things named the same, the person reading it probably will. While, as I understand it, PHP will just overwrite anything with the same name in the file/lib you include). It seems like PHP is heading in the right direction, but I have no idea why anyone would pick it up or start anything new with it these days, I don’t care how well done and the nice and new stuff is, it’s the decade of utter mess it’s built on top of that has uninterested me. Don’t get me wrong, since “acquiring” the Wordpress sites I’ve gone from a blind PHP hater, to at least understanding/appreciating it (but still won’t actually touch it with a 10ft pole). PHP is brain dead easy to deploy and scale up, compared to ruby/python/node (which aren’t _that_ difficult to deploy), PHP is basically the web equivalent of a static binary, in that you can just drop in and it’s basically ready to go. PHP also actually really fast, it’s seriously impressive how fast it can render WP pages especially when you consider the absolute spaghetti/thrown together/clusterfuck code it’s running — Wordpress itself is pretty yikes from the code I’ve seen, but the plugins, Christ, the 50 million sloppy buggy poorly coded plugins — PHP can absolutely run laps around other a decently coded site in other languages (at the cost of having to use PHP I guess ). [1] https://kornel.ski/en/phpns https://kornel.ski/en/phpns [2] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/404613 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/404613
n42 6y ago
you're aware of use directives, yes? use My\Full\Classname as Another; https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.namespaces.importing.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.namespaces.importing....

pavel_lishin 6y ago

Weird. I wonder if a major piece of software released a new version that required more work to update existing software?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mtnGoat 6y ago
Magento, maybe. But I don't think it haa has the user base to drive numbers significantly.

otar 6y ago

It's not a surprise at all. Firstly, PHP has always been around, WordPress based websites still have like 1/3 share of all existing websites. Secondly, in the recent years it got a very mature language, got loads of improvements and performance optimizations. With PHP 8 being planned to be released by the end of this year, it will be another major step forward. Thirdly, Laravel, Symfony and other open source stuff are awesome. I think if PHP does a major comeback as a decent platform for development and somehow gets rid of the undeserved reputation, those PHP devs who stayed with PHP and didn't switch to RoR, Django, Node or other platforms will be winners, including me :)

altdatathrow 6y ago
> somehow gets rid of the undeserved reputation That reputation is a competitive edge for companies and people who embrace PHP. They get shit done for the business and grow revenue while the rest of the tech community is rewriting basic tooling for the 50th time in Rust on a Kubernetes-powered back-end with a React front-end powered by a GraphQL API layer.
- keanebean86 6y ago
  But the new stack is 12% faster!!!!* *We didn't re-run benchmarks after fixing edge cases
- johnnycerberus 6y ago
  I understand what you are trying to say but Kubernetes and React complement services written in PHP, the former can deploy and orchestrate them while the latter offers an option for SPA apps written in PHP. Also, Rust when written where it should be written, can enhance PHP services that require fast and secure components. But yes, trying to replace what PHP is good at (serving content) with Rust is not really the best thing to do.
  - chrisweekly 6y ago
    "SPA apps written in PHP" huh? that sounds like a contradiction in terms.

master_yoda_1 6y ago

A bogus report.

mtmail 6y ago
Any insight why or how the report is bogus?
archgoon 6y ago
Perhaps. What is your reasoning or evidence?
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  When you get a report of something reasonably stable, like the job market, with many changes greater than 100% upwards or 50% downwards, it's automatically suspicious. It's even more suspicious when there are multiple non-niche categories with near 1000% or more of change. But then, if this happens at some time, this year is the best candidate. I'm personally hold any conclusion for when I see independent confirmation.
  - AaronNewcomer 6y ago
    There is one big change that happened recently that could explain this as well. I never posted my PHP jobs on indeed. We always used glassdoor and LinkedIn. Now that indeed has purchased glassdoor and all of those job postings automatically go to indeed that could explain a huge rise in jobs there when in actuality there was always this many jobs.

iainctduncan 6y ago

I suspect this is driven by the fact that a boatload of small companies suddenly had to get their businesses online in a hurry. By number of websites and e-commcerce platforms for small businesses, PHP is massive. By amount of use in +$1M ARR established tech companies, it's miniscule. Covid no doubt drove a lot more of the former this year.

mtnGoat 6y ago
Can you provide evidence of this claim that profitable/large companies don't use PHP? Or just parroting unfounded php hate.
- coding_lobster 6y ago
  I wouldn't say it's unfounded but anecdotal. And I wouldn't necessarily call it "hate" either. PHP definitely isn't one of those technologies that you see often on job listings of major companies - sure they might use it for some things such as blogs but it's rarely part of the stack of their staple products. The question isn't whether they use it but to what extent and in what products.
  - AaronNewcomer 6y ago
    On a quick search of PHP skills wanted on LinkedIn jobs I found the following large companies looking for it: Apple, Cloudflare, Vimeo, Box, Slack, Tesla, Etsy, Wayfair, Shopify, Facebook, Etc
    - sroussey 6y ago
      Clearly WordPress and Magento based businesses. Add in Facebook, Weebly/Square, and you realize that PHP probably drives more page views and powers more domain named sites than any other.
      - spdionis 6y ago
        How are Vimeo and Slack Magento or Wordpress businesses? Etsy also most certainly does not primarily use those.

AznHisoka 6y ago

I am not sure what methodology they are using but to have an old language like php rise that much in popularity makes me think something went wrong with their analysis.

johnnycerberus 6y ago
Languages evolve and PHP did it and still does. PHP is as old as Java. Haskell is even older. In the category of PHP, Java and Haskell we pretty much rehash the same language features with some minor twists in new languages. Hardly we get new features that make an impacts like in the case of Go's goroutines or Rust's borrow checker. The problem is the runtime of the language, on which PHP, the language, runs. That could be easily improved on porting the language to a VM like Facebook did with Hack or to something like GraalVM. Runtimes over languages.
brlewis 6y ago
There are 55k openings on Indeed for React jobs and 8k PHP jobs. When the absolute numbers are lower, there's more opportunity for high percentage growth, which is what they used to rank them.
- drbojingle 6y ago
  React is a library for a language that no one can avoid for front-end development. PHP is a language among many languages which can be used on the backend. JS, Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Elixir,hell even Perl has a web framework. Not really a fair comparison.
  - brlewis 6y ago
    I'm not trying to be fair to the languages. I'm trying to be fair to the people looking at what skills are in high demand.

5cott0 6y ago

ZDNet? C'mon hackernews.

Wronnay 6y ago

I switched from PHP to TypeScript and then Kotlin because in my area companies moved on from PHP to newer technologies. (And I am not the only one, I know lots of people which switched from PHP to other languages) That's probably the reason for a pay rise - many developers switched from PHP to other languages and now companies which still use PHP have to pay more for the few PHP developer

darthrupert 6y ago

Bullshit.

nickthemagicman 6y ago

PHP got way better with version six and seven. I would avoid Jobs maintaining legacy PHP 5 or earlier like the plague.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
otar 6y ago
PHP 6? :) It never got released...
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  Oh haha, I jumped on board at 7. Well that skilled release just means it's like night and day from some of the 5 stuff I see.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

johnnycerberus 6y ago

I'm an experienced JVM developer (mainly Java & Scala) and I had to accept a freelancing project in which one administration component was written in Laravel, a PHP framework. To be honest, the codebase was pretty clean, I could easily understand what's going on, I've used phpStorm as my IDE since I'm used to the feeling of Jetbrains tools. Managed to hack and do the changes in just one week without any prior PHP knowledge. Would I build something new with PHP? Now, I wouldn't. It is not that bad as a language to hack on Wordpress or small websites with Laravel but beside that, it is hard not to choose JVM or Node as platforms for your future projects. Maybe a PHP implementation built on GraalVM will enable PHP to call into JVM libraries. GC and other things will be provided for free, though I think it will be some work since the majority of PHP is native code and its syntax is quite messy.

qsort 6y ago
As a relatively inexperienced JVM developer I pretty much share this view. It's true that PHP isn't PHP 4 anymore, but everything else moved forward as well, Java 11 is a fine language that I have few complaints about. Since you mentioned GraalVM, I'm also pretty excited about the Graal nodejs runtime. I'm a fan of using JS/TS for quick projects, and unifying the runtime would be huge, I hope it will continue to be supported.
sroussey 6y ago
PHP doesn’t need GC, unless you have some long running process which is generally quite rare.

artiscode 6y ago

I don't find it surprising at all. Almost 17 years ago I got into programming thanks to how simple and easy PHP was. Last time I wrote PHP was back in 2013, however I do not hold any grudges. Low entry barrier in learning the syntax, setting up a development environment, and testing it by typing a filename in the URL, how cool is that? It seemed super cool to me as a tech savvy teenager. I was able to start making money from odd programming jobs just six months later since PHP was in high demand.

webel0 6y ago

The tone of this article (plus my experience on indeed) suggests that a lot of these roles are for larger companies, not for little companies who are suddenly online and need a FT/PT web dev. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a shift in job listing behavior that caused a sudden influx of php job listings on indeed. So it isn’t as if the jobs didn’t exist before, they just weren’t posted on Indeed. The salaries discussed (77k) doesn’t suggest that a surge in demand is pushing up pay.

k__ 6y ago

Lately I get all of my projects directly from customers who approach me first and these project have nothing in common with the stuff I find on those job boards or get offered by recruiters. The projects I get directly are of much higher quality that the public offers, but I also ask myself how much such numbers reflect reality. I mean the dark figures could be totally different.

arnvald 6y ago

Aside from PHP itself, the headline drew my attention: > 2020 was a good year to be an entry-level candidate for technology jobs Not sure what's others' experience here, but from what I hear in various markets (mostly within EU) is that fresh grads generally struggle this year, no matter the technology. Companies put hiring on hold and if they resume it's primarily for more critical roles (read: senior positions); it's harder to get a job or even internship as a junior developer. Am I in some kind of negative bubble?

bigdubs 6y ago
Depends what area companies operate in, but where I work (https://blend.com https://blend.com) we're doubling the team again this year and are starting to hire new grads again. Data point of one obviously.
maxlamb 6y ago
I assume this quote is US centric, so yes right now there is probably a substantial difference between US and EU in the demand for entry-level developer jobs (that pay a decent wage).
nefitty 6y ago
Junior roles are really cheap, and the quality of what many people are achieving continues increasing. I think it has to do with the by dance of self/directed learning resources and improvements in boot camps and other programs.
lewishogan 6y ago
My experience has been fairly matched towards yours, I'm a recent Computer Science graduate who's been told a fair number of times that a lot of places just aren't sure if they want to be hiring at the moment.

vorhemus 6y ago

It's a simple question of mass market: How many companies need (and are willing to pay) performance optimized C++ services? And how many need a plain old website and a simple admin interface to add some text?

AndyMcConachie 6y ago

Proving once again that there are only two kinds of programming languages. Programming languages that everyone hates and programming languages that no one uses.

okareaman 6y ago

Are people who write Excel macros real programmers? Do Powershell or Bash scripts count? Is PHP a terrible language? These seem like not smart questions that language snobs like to ponder. Real programmers use Haskell I guess. I recently ran across this article about why you shouldn't hire .NET programmers that really rubbed me the wrong way. https://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-net-programmers/ https://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont... I'm fluent in many languages, like most programmers, and use the right one for the job.

adamredwoods 6y ago

I use it every day and I'm not a fan. Normally I'm language agnostic, whatever your infrastructure supports, I'll adapt to what you use. The largest problem with PHP is how objects use arrow notation, arrays use arrow notation, strings use dot concatenation, and variables use dollar notation. Then I switch to JS or Java and it's all different. As far as the stack for FPM and process managers, I think it works well, but I do enjoy the elegance of Node's event-driven environment.

tonymet 6y ago
that’s the largest problem ?
tasuki 6y ago
> The largest problem with PHP is how objects use arrow notation, arrays use arrow notation, strings use dot concatenation, and variables use dollar notation. I think those are PHP's smallest problems. Semantics more important than syntax.

irrational 6y ago

Is PHP on a path to become the COBOL of this century?

greyman 6y ago
No, it will stay, since a lot of projects are written in it, also new ones. It will stay "forever" like C or C++.
- tasuki 6y ago
  I don't get the "no" part: I think you're in perfect agreement with "irrational". There's heaps of COBOL that's very much staying. People are getting hired as junior COBOL developers in 2020.
  - dataqat 6y ago
    "no" meaning no one is writing new programs/apps in COBOL, only maintaining old ones. "stay" meaning people will keep launching new programs/apps in PHP going forward.
- setr 6y ago
  I mean, COBOL is in the same boat -- there's too much code written in it to outright kill it. They still update the language standard today (2014). The main migration argument I see is usually along the lines of "50% of all COBOL progammers today will be DEAD by 2025!" Rather than about technical/financial merit (anyone willing to migrate on those grounds, and believed it was even possible for their infra, will have already done so)

user2834 6y ago

Needed a new job this year. I looked for a job in Elixir and couldn't get hired. Expanded my scope a bit and got hired for JavaScript and PHP in my highest paying job yet. Not exactly my favorite languages, but hey, it's what the market wants to pay me for.

tasuki 6y ago
I used to write PHP. While the language itself is atrocious, the surrounding ecosystem is pretty good. How are you finding your job?

threesmegiste 6y ago

I like these kind of news. However hipsters jumping on new buzz word language or tech. Evolution is slow. C c++ java php will be here always. Dont jump on inner solution languages of big tech companies.

Existenceblinks 6y ago
The visibility of web industry is only "playing" territory of hipsters echo chamber. And corporations "get it", they create "developer advocate" (modern salesman and brand ambassador), and free review from developer clubs. Fantastic.

bavell 6y ago

Just landed a contract to upgrade an application from Symfony 3.4 -> 5.2 and PHP 5.6 -> 7.4. I've gotten a lot of work from my experience in PHP (where I started in webdev) but personally prefer working with Node and Typescript these days. There's just so much PHP work out there it's hard to avoid!

ukyrgf 6y ago
Same here. Everytime I get a chance to breathe I get another lucrative "can you come fix this legacy php app?" request even though I have a day job making new angular / .net core applications.
- Aduket 6y ago
  Where are you located exactly?

moigagoo 6y ago

Holy cow, where do I apply for junior enterprise architect?

bluedino 6y ago

PHP is to the web world what Visual Basic was to the desktop. Anyone can create a program with it, cheaply and easily. You end up with a lot of terrible code this way. And as the years went on, the products matured into something decent that you COULD write recent code in, but it usually didn’t happen. It’s a good sign that a project will be a terrible mess if it’s in PHP or VB, but a delightful surprise when it isn’t.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

egsmi 6y ago

I was super excited about the idea of AutoCAD being listed as normally us non-web engineers are left out of “tech” but there are some screwy things with these rankings. For example, many of the CAD postings are like this one, https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=8cdc0a90d2325177&from=serp https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=8cdc0a90d2325177&from=se... Where CAD = computer aided dispatch, not computer aided design. I have a hunch whatever code they used create this wasn’t vetted too closely and therefore this should not be trusted.

steve_adams_86 6y ago
This was my take as well. Over 850% growth is huge and I couldn’t find clear data, then other data they’re presenting doesn’t seem very high quality either.

zackmorris 6y ago

I've been programming for over 30 years and PHP is still my favorite language because it's the least-worst (compared to all the others). It's really easy to point out the biggest flaws in each language: C++ - too complex/brittle, template hell which can't be solved on any practical timescale Javascript - stuck at the dead end of the async branch which we later learned was an evolutionary dead end, can only approximate functional programming but at its core is brittle and impossible to future-proof Ruby - too opinionated, solves the easiest problems with syntactic sugar but doesn't touch the real conceptual challenges of imperative programming in any meaningful fashion C# - too much like Java, inherits all of the flaws around null for example Java - solves the programming problems of the 90s that we later learned were better solved by JIT compilers, immutable data and such, it's biggest flaw being that it's object-driven instead of function-driven Rust - the highest expression of imperative programming, whose problems are better solved via immutable, declarative, data-driven and functional programming using copy-on-write Python - killed by the version 2 to 3 transition, unfortunately never really found clarity around string handling, cute at first sight but painful to use beyond a certain level of complexity or code size Perl - perhaps the most adventurous language in the 90s for blurring the lines between all programming paradigms, but succumbed to not having a single source of truth in its style or conventions (I want to love it as much as PHP, but it's write-only nature will forever limit it) Lisp - best language conceptually but unfortunately write-only because it clings to old ideas like abbreviations and byzantine academic abstractions that we've now learned are anti-patterns (the assembly language of functional programming) This list grows forever, with each new language having a very specific/acute kind of shortcoming which profoundly limits some use case. Which is why I'm especially fond of PHP not trying to be the best at anything. It's the only language I know of that is one conceptual step away from all the others. We can tell C++ or Javascript programmers that PHP is the same but with a $ in front of variables for string interpolation. Shell scripters recognize everything it does immediately. Now PHP does have a lot of problems, the largest being that it's starting to succumb to design by committee and cargo culting. I have not been especially happy with the direction it's gone since PHP 5 and classes. There are some small wins like ternary "?:", but for each of those, there are major flaws like "\" in namespaces. Great shame has befallen PHP at times. But I know of no other language as forgiving, or that tends to "just work" in a REPL, or that has such a vast system library built in. I often find myself thinking in PHP and then having to translate whatever crappy language or framework I happen to be using that day. As far as the future goes, I would very much like to see PHP incorporate some of the newer declarative and data-driven methodologies that have sprung from languages like MATLAB and Julia over the last 10-20 years. I'm not especially happy with TensorFlow because the forest of elegance is lost in the trees of byzantine concepts like with Lisp. But I really think that if PHP skipped over SIMD and went straight to MIMD with with some kind of simple, easy to understand vector handling that didn't break convention, and could be executed synchronously in parallel across many cores, it would really have something. I think this could combine many of the advantages of how Python is being used for data-driven research, without the friction that Python introduces. I could see something like this eventually replacing React/JSX if it also got browser support. Writing this out is kind of hilarious and you can laugh if you want to. I agree that PHP is nowhere near ideal. But I know exactly what I need to get real work done on a daily basis, and PHP is the only language (by a wide margin) that even comes close to giving me the leverage I need across many disciplines of computer science.

aphextron 6y ago

What exactly is a "junior enterprise architect"?

sosilkj 6y ago
agreed. can someone explain what this role is? seems to pay extremely well for a 'junior' role. fta: "The national average salary for this role is $144,752 and job listings for these roles have grown 278% over the past year."

yuy910616 6y ago

800% of 10 jobs is 80 jobs.

OCISLY 6y ago

people are leaving so number of untaken seats is increasing

megous 6y ago

PHP was always a pleasure to work with, but I also like C, so your mileage may vary. :D

pachico 6y ago

I really can't stand another thread about how PHP was in the past vs now it is now, or about how popular it is or how was designed. Please, let's move on, it is really time to move on :)

nidaye999 6y ago

Goods

chrshawkes 6y ago

The numbers are BS and most likely related to lots of freelance programmers laid off in the pandemic. If you look at the overall jobs for PHP on Indeed, it's less than years ago and on a steady decline for over 5+ years. It's a dead end language in the USA.