[gregjor]

Not my experience. Lots of marketing departments and agencies use WordPress. They have huge budgets with discretionary spending authority, unlike IT departments. Who cares if WordPress isn’t a “modern framework” or uses PHP? It pays the same as any other programming as long as you don’t scrape the bottom of the barrel putting up mom & pop sites or submitting bids on Upwork.

I have Fortune 1000 clients running multiple WP sites put together by agencies that have no back-end integration or database skills in house, they outsource that. Pay is very good, same as any other back-end programming.

[Rjevski]

> Who cares if WordPress isn’t a “modern framework”

Developer experience? I'd rather spend my way working with Laravel than crap old PHP code written like it's in the 90's.

> It pays the same as any other programming as long as you don’t scrape the bottom of the barrel putting up mom & pop sites

It's good that you manage to find good clients but this wasn't my experience. A lot of WP projects go to the lowest bidder which just doesn't happen with the technologies I work with and recommend.

So if you already make good money on WP then go ahead by any means, but I personally wouldn't recommend getting into it if you're starting out.

[gregjor]

I have a little developer experience. Some old code is crap. Some new code is crap. Frameworks can help or make a bigger mess. In the context of solving business problems it makes little difference. Clients don’t care.

I didn’t get the impression the original poster was just starting out. Low-end Wordpress work is competitive and not well-paid, like all low-end work. Competition is always most fierce at the low end of any talent market. Plenty of complex, challenging, and good paying Wordpress projects out there.

[Rjevski]

> I have a little developer experience.

By "developer experience" I meant the equivalent of "user experience", ie whether the codebase is enjoyable to work with.

> I didn’t get the impression the original poster was just starting out

IMO it would still require them to get familiar with Wordpress before being able to get the good jobs, which means he's going to be stuck with crap gigs for some time while he builds references.

[gregjor]

I get your point about good code vs. bad code, but in my experience that doesn’t have much to do with legacy vs. modern frameworks. It has to do with the skills and aesthetics of the original developer. I work on framework-based code (Laravel, etc.) that I don’t find very enjoyable, and I work on procedural PHP from ten years ago that I find easy to work on.

Programmers who focus on their own enjoyment or priorities like working with the most recent tools and frameworks will turn up their nose at less appealing legacy work, and that’s why there’s so many companies unable to hire people to work on their business systems and web sites. To some developers an older code base is just a turd, to others it’s an opportunity. After working with a legacy system for a while and incrementally refactoring it, if my client decides to rewrite it they will talk to me rather than sending out RFPs. I have two ground-up rewrites in progress right now that started as legacy support work. Those clients didn’t write RFPs or ask anyone else to bid on the work.

I agree that learning Wordpress, or anything, takes time. Wordpress certainly has some bad design decisions (mainly caused by maintaining compatibility with a huge installed base), and some ugliness to work around, but on the other hand WP has a large and mature developer community, good documentation, and lots of tools and add-ons.