[marcosdumay]

There's no linter for hiring candidates. When you announce a PHP position, you are acknowledging that you'll get someone that doesn't care about maintainability, security, and whatever. Candidates will react accordingly.

And yes, Javascript has similar problems, but much less severe.

[earthboundkid]

Every job where I've done PHP has been sold to me as a job programming in something else. :-)

I do think that one of the big problems for PHP is that people who voluntarily do PHP instead of something else are immediately suspect. Why aren't they interested in learning something else? Do they not really care about code quality? Do they just say 'good enough' and only give a half-assed effort?

Modern PHP is fine, comparable to other dynamic languages but with some ugly weird bits (`empty`). However, most PHP I run into is not modern. It's leftover code from the 00s that has huge security holes that no one has noticed yet. If someone wants to make a new project with Laravel or Craft CMS, I wouldn't stand in their way, but I can't really imagine doing it myself just because of all the flashbacks to code that parses query parameters and calls the database in the middle of a templated for loop…

[sacks2k]

"I do think that one of the big problems for PHP is that people who voluntarily do PHP instead of something else are immediately suspect"

I write lots of PHP for work and for most of my personal projects. Learning other languages is just syntax, when you know the core concepts.

I once converted a personal project over to Python 3.X in a couple of weeks and it was much slower and took more memory than the PHP counterpart, so I scrapped it.

"However, most PHP I run into is not modern"

This may be the case for you, but I've worked with lots of companies that built their apps using PHP and most are modern.

"but I can't really imagine doing it myself just because of all the flashbacks to code that parses query parameters and calls the database in the middle of a templated for loop"

I'm sure there were many poor practices with other languages 20+ years ago.

I think many here on HN are living in a bubble where most companies use cool new frameworks and are looked down upon for their stack choices.

I haven't been out of work in the past two decades, and I work almost exclusively with PHP code bases. I suppose I should be happy for all of this language snobbery, because I make a very good living and haven't spent more than a few days between gigs.

[earthboundkid]

> I'm sure there were many poor practices with other languages 20+ years ago.

I agree with most of what you wrote, but not this. Code written in PHP from the 5 and before era was bad in a unique way. Before it came bad VB and now there is a deluge of bad React. That’s what happens when a language is popular with inexperienced programmers. But bad PHP was bad and insecure by default, which led to a ton of security bugs. The only thing comparable is C, which has had tons of buffer overflow security bugs—but those were written by pros. ;-) I can’t think of anything else web facing with so many problems with SQL injection and string escaping. The problem was that making a webpage by naive string interpolation is a bad idea, but it seemed like a good idea and it’s what PHP did best and why it was so popular. PHP was lucky to be the wrong paradigm at the right time to take off like a rocket.

Modern PHP is MVC-ish like everything else, but without the simplicity of stupid string interpolation, it can’t attract users like bad PHP used to.

[potta_coffee]

I think the parent comment is just describing some of the perceptions they've seen about PHP. I've done PHP work, but I've noticed the same perception. Also in my area, there's a lot of PHP work, but it's generally much lower paid. I know a lot of tech people here, and some of them are writing really modern PHP - for much lower pay than a .NET developer at a comparable job. It's definitely possible to do great work in PHP, and it's also definitely perceived (rightly or wrongly) at least in some circles to not be awesome.

[karatestomp]

> Every job where I've done PHP has been sold to me as a job programming in something else. :-)

"Oh and we also have a couple [dozen] Wordpress sites but I doubt you'll be touching those much."

[umanwizard]

Facebook has almost certainly the world's largest codebase in any PHP-family language (Hack, which is essentially PHP + gradual typing + a better standard library, but still very much PHP-flavored). The code is fine.

Part of the reason is the improvements of Hack over PHP, part of the reason is very aggressive linting (to, e.g., enforce the use of types), and part of it is probably that Facebook doesn't hire for "PHP positions", but for generalist software engineers.

[eeZah7Ux]

Facebook indeed does not have the same hiring bar as "$company php (sweat)shop".

However, all the other companies align themselves to the level of the average candidate they can hire.

The quality of the library ecosystem in both js and php is a good measure of that level - sadly.

[boarnoah]

Anecdotal, but I was involved in technical interviews for a full stack developer position within a team last year.

Our stack at the time was transitioning to .NET Core, but the HR posting was some generic one (I believe for a "full-stack dev" with PHP experience).

Got a bizarre range of candidates who had got past the inital filtering, all except one whose PHP amounted to wordpress only experience (some who were not able to clearly differentiate between serverside and clientside state or logic).

Don't want to tar folks with the same brush, but that experience led me to believe the folks who got filtered through for possessing PHP experience, in this case, were extremely bottom of the barrel.

[pavel_lishin]

Honestly, if I'm ever in charge of hiring, I will probably be heavily biased against anyone who mentions having PHP experience without a deep, regretful sigh as an accompaniment.

[karatestomp]

> When you announce a PHP position, you are acknowledging that you'll get someone that doesn't care about maintainability, security, and whatever.

It's also announcing your pay will be way on the low end. At least that's what it means around here.