When I learned that PHP significantly dropped in the TIOBE index back in April 2024, I was not surprised. Over the past year, having seen how the job market is now compared to 10 years ago, and 24 years ago when I graduated CalPoly, Software Engineering is no longer just “one language”. PHP was a wonderful language and still seems to have its niche market, but that’s it.
Since Fall 2023, I’ve looked at probably around 10,000 job listings (probably a conservative number, from what I’ve documented). This is basically the short list of where PHP is used:
- Maybe 20-ish listings (out of 10,000) – Old custom frameworks (if there even is a framework)
- Maybe 50-ish listings Laravel: Decently paying, just very rare
- A few hundred listings Drupal (along with the CMS): low-paying. Think like $35 to $45 per hour (compared to the $100k to $200k+ for Python and Node.JS jobs out there)
- Hundreds of listings: WordPress extension support (even lower paying than the above… Try $25 to $35 per hour)
Putting those Dollar amounts in perspective, here in California, the minimum wage at McDonald’s is now… $20 an hour.
Here is my gut comparison to the other popular Full-Stack Back-End languages:
- Maybe 100 listings for Ruby on Rails… though it is probably closer to 60 ish.
- Several thousand listings for Python
- Thousand ish for C# & .NET
- Thousands of listings for Node.js
- Ironically, some, but not much for Java (its mostly used in the stand-alone world)
- Go seems to be coming up more and more frequently.
Are these numbers precise? Where did I come up with them? Remember the Ruby on Rails app that I started back in September 2023? I’ve logged all of the job listings that I’ve applied to (which missed maybe the first 100-ish before the app was ready to store anything). And that is just what I applied to. I’ve seen maybe 10 times that many, and I only applied to the ones that were close-ish to my current skill set, so I’m estimating that I’ve maybe seen around 10,000 ish listings. Where am I seeing these listings? I heavily use the Indeed and LinkedIn features to “hide” and “dismiss” listings that I’ve already seen. Indeed does not have huge amounts of listings for “PHP Developers”. Dice has more listings than Indeed, but it is missing that feature (which I’ve grown very accustomed to). Yes, I’ve looked at LaraJobs, Glassdoor, Monster, and Zip Recruiter. But, from a volume of listings perspective, those just don’t compete with LinkedIn. In Fall 2023, I spent a lot of time on Otta, but that site feels like it specializes in just Node.JS and Python jobs.
My next application release will be in Python, which has some amazing data analysis libraries that I’ll use. And I did not know at the time (I do now for future releases) all of the subtle skills to look for and document. The percentages are estimated recollections. I know that they aren’t perfect, but they are close enough for me to get a general sense and confirm what the TIOBE Index spelled out.
PHP applications have been, by design, a full stack environment (LAMP), rarely stand-alone (like Java and C++). So classic “Software Engineering Jobs” which are largely one language environments, never used PHP. The PHP jobs, which were years ago migrated to Python, aren’t “just Python”. Most website application jobs (well above 95%) require a true front-end framework: some flavor of React.js is required (like Vue, Next, and Angular). A high percentage (feels like over 80%) require cloud-based environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and MVC frameworks (Django, .NET, Node.js, Spring). I think I’ve seen over half are now using containers (Docker, Kubernetes). The interesting thing that I recently learned is that the AWS Lambda doesn’t even have native PHP support: but it does support all those other languages.
I’ve really learned the lesson, the hard way, that if your employer does not stay with the industry trends, your loyalty will be punished severely (in more ways than one)! Do everything you can to watch the industry trends, have your own project site on the side, and demonstrate to others your abilities there… till you’re ready to take the plunge…