I push, therefore I am: two days at Etsy (2013)

This is probably the best way to understand the increasing push towards static types lately. It isn't so much necessarily the experience of writing the code the first time, where static types may at least sometimes indeed be a bit harder to work with. It's that it's a relatively easy to work with code that takes a list of OrderIDs and CustomerIDs and returns a map of CustomerID -> Order, and calls a function that takes an OrderID and yields an Order, a method that takes an Order and yields a Customer structure, and a method that takes a Customer and yields a CustomerID, and finally constructs exactly the promised structure. You can change it and feel pretty good about what's going on and what's going to happen both to the code it calls and the code that call it.

On the other hand, working with code that takes a something and a something and returns a something, calling a function that takes as something and yields a something, another function that yields a something and a something, and a method on one of those somethings that takes a something and yields and something, and then returns something, is harder to work with, before we even talk about the fact that these somethings may have no literal source code existence because there were dynamically assembled, and after the somethings were dynamically assembled, other somethings may have come along and turned those somethings into something else.

Obviously, the first case still isn't heavenly and the second case isn't as bad as I make it sound in this brief summary, but there's still a real difference.

However, all the other companies align themselves to the level of the average candidate they can hire.

The quality of the library ecosystem in both js and php is a good measure of that level - sadly.

I write lots of PHP for work and for most of my personal projects. Learning other languages is just syntax, when you know the core concepts.

I once converted a personal project over to Python 3.X in a couple of weeks and it was much slower and took more memory than the PHP counterpart, so I scrapped it.

"However, most PHP I run into is not modern"

This may be the case for you, but I've worked with lots of companies that built their apps using PHP and most are modern.

"but I can't really imagine doing it myself just because of all the flashbacks to code that parses query parameters and calls the database in the middle of a templated for loop"

I'm sure there were many poor practices with other languages 20+ years ago.

I think many here on HN are living in a bubble where most companies use cool new frameworks and are looked down upon for their stack choices.

I haven't been out of work in the past two decades, and I work almost exclusively with PHP code bases. I suppose I should be happy for all of this language snobbery, because I make a very good living and haven't spent more than a few days between gigs.

"Oh and we also have a couple [dozen] Wordpress sites but I doubt you'll be touching those much."

It's used for all of our content, but specifically what you're referring to are liveblogs, where a journalist can write short content and append it to the existing article.

Here's an example of such an article https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/apr/23/coronavir...