[teambayleaf]

I think the lesson here is "don't be a commodity"?

In this light, PHP coders are real commodities. They are paid lowly, treated as expendable, and get no respect by peers. I think they're going down the same path of "HTML experts" which were once lucrative business in early 1990s.

Java/C++ programmers fare better because (I guess) there is some fundamental difficulty to be proficient at them. So, despite being old and boring, being good at Java or C(++) is still a good business.

Learning Go/Rust is another way to avoid being a commodity. Although they have a smaller job market, employers need to treat you with respect, because they can't easily find another worker with a matched skill in the market.

[twblalock]

Java and C++ aren’t popular because they are difficult to be proficient at. They are popular because they fit the needs of enterprise software better than other languages, and enterprise companies committed to them a long time ago and have huge amounts of software written in those languages.

[systematical]

PHP devs make good money, maybe not what their peers in "good" languages make, but a good Senior PHP dev is making six figures in most markets these days.