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Comment by andirk | Hacker News Reader

I tell people that you are looking for _one_ position, not 10,000. There will always be a position somewhere that fits your needs. Its more difficult in down times to a degree. And if your industry is in a huge slump, find a new industry! There's more work to do than can ever be done.

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I wish that was the case, but my experience is that there are fewer PHP jobs.

Switching a stack won't help cos places want years of experience.

Most ads seem to be written for the unicorn engineer with 10+ years of experience in every part of the company's stack, but realistically any place you'd actually want to work for is going to be happy with a few years of dev experience in a similar domain + ability and willingness to learn new stuff.

>I wish that was the case, but my experience is that there are fewer PHP jobs.

Someone told me early in my career that "my grandkids will be maintaining PHP applications". He was probably right. You might be seeing less on the job boards nowadays, but half the web still runs on PHP.

Some of the jobs won't be posted - they'll just be in-network referrals. That's how much of my work comes to me.

Fewer PHP jobs, or fewer job openings, or fewer postings? I don't know if "fewer PHP jobs" is true across the board, but might be regional or 'industrial'? It may just be because I try to stay plugged in, but I don't see a marked difference in PHP jobs.

I have a colleague who was at a place that had a decent PHP base. Several years old, but... it was mostly written by a couple of people, and it got... quite hairy. After 4-5 years, they brought in a very capable person, who began a lot of refactoring. But... he was still doing this primarily in isolation. The company was growing, but they kept treating the big monolith API ... as its own thing, and it kept getting harder to expand.

"We can't find good PHP people!". But... they weren't trying very hard. This was pre-pandemic, and they were requiring people to be onsite in most cases. Colleague pinged me last year - they started rebuilding in node "because it was easier to find people".

But... this was such a ... shifting of goal posts. The problem was not "PHP is bad", but letting one person write all your business logic in isolation from the rest of the company is bad. The node rebuild is a moderate size team, who have an existing API to code against, and they're all working, greenfield, with the latest/newest versions of everything. Somehow "node is better" is the lesson they're drawing from this.

My colleague had suggested "let's rebuild some portions of this monolith API as a group". "Nope, no time for that". Well... they made time, but decided that the language was the main root cause. I can guarantee if they'd let someone build large chunks of this on their own in isolation from everyone else for weeks/months at a time... they'd hit the same problems in the next year or so.

And so "PHP is dying" sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, at least in the eyes of some. Yet... I've been hearing it for 22 years. And it ain't going away. And yes, it's being used for new dev/projects. I'm scheduled to convert a java system over to PHP8 early next year.

This may not help immediately, and I know the landscape has changed in many areas, but years ago, I went to multiple different tech groups and conferences - java, ruby, perl, ms/.net. I introduced myself as a PHP person. Beyond the standard lame jokes people tried to lay on me, I made connections. I was often the only PHP person some of these folks had ever met face to face. Months went by, and I would get calls from those same people "hey, someone is asking me for a PHP dev - are you available?" or "my friend's company has some PHP questions - can you help?"

This is not an immediate silver bullet, and I know COVID changed a lot of how we meet and interact. But... it may be something that helps someone out there.

My company recently gave up on acquiring another company, mainly because their backend is written in PHP. Not that there is anything wrong with PHP, but we deemed it too expensive to expand the team, because there are a few big companies that snap up all the good PHP developers in my area and we couldn't match the salary.

There are plenty of legacy systems that people need to maintain, no matter what the tech stack is. As others say, network, network and network some more...

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