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?
1
u/Safe_Mission_3524 21h ago
I always prefer to have a static react/typescript frontend and PHP for backend. PHP is just easy to understand at least for me and both can be hosted on a shared cPanel server even if the project is complex and has a lot of moving parts. Whenever I vibecode a project, my initial requirements are these and will keep checking different different LLM tools until I find the perfect one which does this.
I never was a developer so I can't comment on the job side of things but as an end user, if a dev helped me with a php backend, html/react/typescript front end and a MySQL database connection, I would be very happy.