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Comment by ludamad | Hacker News Reader

You can hire "good programmers" and ask them to write PHP - Facebook does

Facebook, Slack, Etsy, the list goes on. In fact, I think all thosr companies are actually hiring right now, unlike many of those advanced non-PHP shops.

Many employers use php because it allows keeping salaries down, though. So your advice would not work for those.

The parent post complained about the quality not salary level of PHP programmers, though. The parent wants a quality PHP programmer, you want to keep salaries down - there is an acceptable tradeoff, somewhere.

The parent poster didn't complain about anything, he pointed out the flaw in the grandparent poster's claim.

Facebook writes Hack, which is nontrivially different from PHP, and those differences matter.

I doubt that Facebook tries to hire Hack devs off the street. No one uses Hack except FB. They hire PHP developers and teach them Hack in boot camps.

The point being, you can hire good php devs.

Facebook probably just hires super bright developers, not PHP developers per se. Those developers can pick up Hack in a couple of months.

Normally, bright developers acquire a new language* within a few weeks, if they already know the paradigm from another language. Hack is OOP, and so are many others, so I would expect a bright developer to learn hack in 2-3 weeks, not months.

Heck, I just read the docs of hack for 2 hours, and I already got a good sense of what the language can do. I worked with PHP internals, and a bunch of other languages in my career.

* as language we define the language, its syntax and semantics, not any other library or the ecosystem. And yes, the standard library is still just a library. Knowing a list of functions and parameters does not mean knowing a language.

Well Ruby is OOP, is it gonna be super easy for me to get a java web development job? All things being equal a hiring company will go for someone with 3 years java experience over my 8 years Ruby experience. Facebook has no choice since no one knows their language, but most other companies will hire someone with the particular experience of their stack if possible.

No, facebook doesn't. The good programmers facebook hires don't work on the legacy PHP code. They do stuff like sigma. Also, I am not describing a problem, I am pointing out that their perceived problem doesn't exist. If I can hire a good programmer and make them write PHP, I could also hire the good programmer and let them write in a tolerable language, so the mythical "its easy to find PHP devs and impossible to find anything else devs" claim is out the window.

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