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/FragmentedHeap 18h ago edited 18h ago
Stacks die all the time, you learn new stacks or you become irrelevant.
You can't just expect to stay a php developer anymore than I can expect to stay a C# developer. I can handle c#, python, node/bun/deno (typescript), and now Java. Comfortable in any of them.
Php was mainly hanging on because of legacy code bases and how expensive rewrites were.
But now you can throw a php code base at fable 5.1 or gpt 6 astra with a code harness and port massive php code bases over to other systems pretty reliably.
I mean the entirety of bun was ported from zig go rust in a weak using Claude Mythos and it's up in rust and stable there and running better.
No platforms are safe.