re. PHP programmers, I agree with you totally.  There are lots of people
who picked up PHP one day and decided they're developers, with no experience
or training in software dev.  Likewise, its takes a lot of effort to
convince someone you're qualified in the field of PHP probably due to the
points you mention.  But in general, hiring is a really tricky thing in IT
and there really is no science to it.  If you manage to find a group of
people that works well together and is productive in some way thats unique,
you've struck gold.

  I started using PHP coming form more formal languages like C++ and Java.
Even the quality of people is really totally different.  With most Java
developers, you can assume a certain level of knowledge.  PHP people tend to
be salty types, tendency towards hack-and-slash technique.  Granted, these
guys may know a lot about the web, etc. but they don't know jack about how
to design software.  In the past year though, with PHP5 you're starting to
see a new class of PHP programmer emerge.  I've met a lot of good people in
the Drupal community, which I'm sorry to see you appear to be departing
from. :(

 -jmz



On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Alex Dean <alex@crackpot.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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