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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