der.hans wrote:

> PHP jobs might also be in the 'fill quite easily' category.

Speaking as someone who's had to fill 'PHP Developer' vacancies a few 
times, I have to disagree with this claim to a certain degree.

There is an extremely large pool of people who think of themselves as 
PHP developers.  Weeding through this huge pool to find the (seemingly) 
few who have the experience/ability/aptitude to work on high-traffic web 
applications is quite difficult.

I attribute this to the very low barrier to entry for PHP.  That's a 
great quality in the language, but it makes spotting the good developers 
a bit more complex.

If you're interested in doing PHP professionally, it would serve you 
well to learn the ins and outs of related technologies as well.  (Mysql, 
postgres, Apache, linux, javascript, etc)  Familiarity with 
architectural ideas like 'web services' is another smart area to invest 
some time in.  As I write that, I realize it's definitely not specific 
to PHP.  I'm currently a Ruby On Rails developer, and it's just as true 
now as when I was doing PHP full-time.

alex