It's a double edge sword. I'm going to speak about my experiences with PHP (8 years worth). Anybody can pick up PHP. I kid you not, not just programmers, so t

It's a double edge sword. I'm going to speak about my experiences with PHP (8 years worth). Anybody can pick up PHP. I kid you not, not just programmers, so the labor pool for PHP is huge so the wages are lower. Not only is it lower compare to say Ruby but there are tons of bad self taught programmers. I led a development team of 5 programmers and let me tell you, 3 of them were self taught-- they were very very bad. Needless to say, I tried apply to other places and all salaries they've offered were slap in the face. When I asked them for 80k they would be like we can hire 2 programmers with that salary (80k for 8 freaking years man, I'm very confident with my skills). Hell you can just outsource it to another country with that logic. My last interview I was interviewed by a CTO PHP dev, it was bad. During the interview he uses so many buzz words it was killing me inside. "We migrate our code base from PHP4 to PHP5.3 and hydrate our code." Wtf does hydrate even mean? Needless to say he can really sell himself to non technical people. He asked a shit tons of technical questions from his ipad (design patterns, pdo & prepared statement, etc..), I'm pretty sure he googled it, I asked him a few until it dawn to me he was self taught. I asked to confirm it. Yup. Like if he knows closure, traits, etc.. He would always right off the bat says of course never really explaining it. I asked him if he was part of the old php developers he said no. If he was the most senior, yup. What happen to the old developers. He stopped, and you can see the gears in his head churning trying to give a nice excuse. "They didn't work out and didn't meet project deadlines. So we clean them out and now we me in charge we went from fixing 2 bugs to 20 bugs and from finishing 1 projects to 5 projects." Noticed how he focus on output instead of code maintenance. Real hallmark of some dude that backstab or suck up to a higher ladder rung position. These people and people like this is the reason why I'm moving away from PHP. I would like to be under someone that is at least knowledgeable and as passionate as me in programming. Most of these PHP shops offer horrible salary and they don't offer any good incentive. If you're going to give horrible salary you should at least offer learning opportunity (ruby, redis, nodejs, android, ios, anything). But nope, you get stuck with PHP code from some self taught programmer, you don't grow and advance you're just stuck at PHP among the huge labor pool.