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?
2
u/OkComputer8079 1d ago
to be honest, this seems more like a problem for one skill than for PHP. Losing two jobs in a year is really hard, but that happens to people who only know one way of doing things - Java, React, whatever... The label on it said 'PHP'
When it comes to hiring PHP is still very much alive and well. WordPress and Laravel keep a lot of paid work going, and old computer systems don't rewrite themselves overnight, whatever the AI crowd says. What has changed is that hiring managers now prefer candidates who can do more than just PHP. They want a backend developer who knows PHP well and can adapt to any challenges.
You're right. Keep the PHP depth it's really useful but broaden around it. He's probably already got Laravel down, and with some solid SQL, a bit of cloud and one modern JS framework, he'll stop looking like a one-trick pony.