The awesome future of the PHP stack for careers
More recently, there has been positive news that JetBrains has encouraged the creation of the THE PHP Foundation, which will fund and coordinate the further development of PHP as a modern programming language. This is great news as PHP support and development moves from an enthusiast-based model to a more organized structure.
Now the development of PHP is based on a reliable model, and we are no longer afraid to meet “the same bus” after which we would have to come to our senses and somehow cope with the situation.
In this article, I will share my enthusiasm for a bright future for our beloved PHP, and why PHP is worth considering for your career.
When discussing the choice of a stack, many people (especially experienced developers with developed professional deviations) emphasize the “power” of the language, the brevity of its constructions and some features. And although this is quite understandable and fair, nevertheless, when starting a career in IT, you should choose a stack that will provide the greatest chances of getting a job and the development of an individual as an IT specialist. And here, in my opinion, there is no better candidate than PHP:
A huge pool of vacancies at various levels. A lot of projects of different levels work on the PHP stack, ranging from the development of some plugins for specific CMS systems, to huge microservice structures that rotate terabytes of information. And in fact, anyone who has spent enough time and effort to master the PHP in particular and web development in general can find a job.
Yes, most likely, the first job will not be the most desirable, and the stack will not be the most modern, but you will already be on the train of the modern it-world. All that remains is to upgrade, learn, improve and go to the head carriage for your offers in the best companies.
Comprehensible toolkit. Gone are the days when there were many solutions of unknown quality and support on the PHP stack that were offered on the market. At the moment, the stack has matured, which has developed into quite high-quality products with an understandable support and tooling scheme. I’m talking, of course, about Symfony, Laravel, Doctrine, phpstan, rector, phpunit and so on. Yes, in some places, these solutions can be inferior in customization to mature products from the Java and .NET world, but they have long been enough to write products of predictable quality.
Live projects. At the moment, many large projects and startups are developing on the PHP stack, both in Russia and in Europe and the United States. If you are an experienced PHP developer, you can rest assured that you will receive job offers from mature companies or international startups every day.
And these are completely different areas: real estate, medicine, tourism, e-commerce, marketing automation tools, online schools, delivery services, logistics companies, and so on. Now it is already difficult to find an area where there are no projects on the PHP stack.
Therefore, PHP offers excellent opportunities to touch projects from various fields. It is not necessary to connect your life exclusively with telecom or fintech.
Salary expectations. Of course, there are other stacks on the market where employers’ salary opportunities are higher than the PHP stack. But this situation is changing and the wage gap is rapidly decreasing. It is already difficult to surprise corporate PHP developers with salaries that differ only by 10-15% from the salaries of top Java developers.
PHP-stack has long ceased to be perceived as something “toy”, on which you can make a website for three kopecks. Complex systems require professional developers who have the merit to work solely for a salary that matches their level. And the more large PHP systems are created, the more these expectations will grow.
A clear vector of language development. If in 2012-2014 it was difficult to say which stack is best suited for developing agile projects by product teams (PHP / Python or Ruby). Then at the end of 2021 there is simply not a single argument against the choice of PHP.
– Python turned out to be such a flexible and versatile language that it simply lost its focus on web development. Toolkit specifically for web development has dropped significantly in comparison with competitors. In other areas (testing, devops, ML, etc. – everything is fine with him)
– Ruby became trite to no one needed when modern frameworks in other languages adopted the revolutionary ROR model (I’m talking about the Russian Federation and Europe in particular, in the US the situation is different).
At the same time, the entire evolution of PHP and its tolling goes in only one direction – to write faster, more productive systems with clear reliability. And that’s cool!
Developer community. In the PHP world, a close-knit group of PHP celebrities has formed, which promote the language to the masses and allow the language to develop and improve. And the best part is that most of this group are Russian-speaking guys who are open to communication. If you have an idea or proposal, you are literally one handshake away from people who have influence on the language.
Behind the language are not any corporations that sit on the other side of the world – these are the guys who are among us. This is great! It is inspiring.
There aren’t enough Java developers for everyone. As practice shows, now in the world as a whole (and in the Russian Federation in particular) too many projects are being done, for which there is simply not enough developers. This is especially evident if the company is fixated on one kind of stack. Therefore, even conservative companies understand that they need to diversify risks and increase the influx of developers, which is achieved by launching products on different stacks.
As a result, even in companies that have never been associated with the PHP world before, projects begin to appear on the PHP stack, where you can easily apply and get a job. PHP has ceased to be associated with marginal self-taught people who write bad code, now it is quite an excellent stack for launching projects for entire areas of large business.
PHP projects are trite cheaper and easier to run. And now it’s such a time that a business needs exactly this speed and flexibility, which is why so many PHP projects are starting to appear.
The celebration of life will continue with PHP. The language has a clear application, which is in demand among both startups and mature projects. So you definitely can’t go wrong with choosing PHP as your stack.
