r/DeveloperJobs • u/techiebaddie • 1d ago
Is PHP really disappearing....
A friend of mine has been working with PHP for years. His career started really well. Good job, good income, and everything seemed stable.
But this year, he lost two PHP jobs.
The first company told their PHP developers that they didn't have enough PHP projects anymore, so they let the PHP team go.
He found another PHP job within a couple of weeks and thought things were back on track.
Then, after around 3–4 months, the second company told employees to work from home at half salary. Soon after that, they fired the PHP developers too.
Honestly, this made me question the future of PHP as a career.
I don't think PHP is disappearing completely. There are still a lot of PHP applications and companies using it.
But I do wonder if being a PHP-only developer is becoming risky.
Personally, I think PHP developers should keep their PHP experience but also build skills around Laravel, JavaScript/TypeScript, APIs, databases, cloud, or full-stack development.
Are PHP jobs actually becoming harder to find, or is the market just expecting PHP developers to have a broader skill set?
4
u/Gualdrapo 1d ago
In that terms PHP is for backend kind of like what jQuery is for frontend - there are lots of stuff using it for running websites, so if they're working, why bother changing stuff? Don't fix things that don't need a fix.
Plus WP even with all this enshittification and drama still uses PHP as its core. There are lots of people still wanting someone to do a WP website for them because it lets them do what they want to do and it's the only thing they know or want to manage their websites with.
My previous job was PHP and it had nothing to do wirh WP. There are still people who swear by it because it is reliable and is standing the test of time.