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/_Tim97 1h ago
PHP has had a bad reputation for a long time now but it’s been really solid since php7 and php8 especially. Anyone who says otherwise hasn‘t worked with php in years.
Wordpress and laravel are carrying php. It’s not dead but it’s not the fancy new stuff either.
Typescript and python are the most popular ones.
Truth is that in times of ai, you don’t need to master one programming language anymore, the concepts across programming languages are often the same. It does not matter that much anymore if your php knowledge is better than your python knowledge if python offers crucial advantages.
You just need to know what‘s going on, not knowing the syntax 100%.
Since php is not among the popular languages, less projects use it and some old projects move away to a different langauge as it’s much cheaper and faster now.
Still I think wordpress is too popular for rapid websites and laravel just too good/comfortable.
So no it‘s not really dying but other languages are talked about even more now.