[mfer]

There are a lot of WordPress sites. The same site reporting the metrics on PHP also points out that WordPress is 42.5% of all sites [1].

That being said, I know a fair number of PHP developers. None of them are in SV or Seattle. They are in cities many have not heard of. They're all over. Some do public sites. Some do company internal web apps.

Take a project like Symfony, a PHP framework. It's popular but not the most popular. Now, take a look at the download stats for its packages [2]. They are large.

There is software development happening all over the world. A bunch of it is in PHP.

[1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress

[2] https://packagist.org/?query=symfony

[danaris]

> That being said, I know a fair number of PHP developers. None of them are in SV or Seattle. > There is software development happening all over the world.

I think this is probably the biggest part of the HN bubble: the idea that "tech hubs" like Silicon Valley make up all, or a supermajority, of tech workers.

I've never even visited the west coast, never lived in a town larger than about 20k people, and frankly never really want to live in a city. Yet I work in tech, and have my entire adult life. (At this point, I am, in fact, primarily a PHP programmer.)

And I'm hardly an exception.

Nearly every company over a handful of employees needs tech support, programming, a website, even servers managed. Many of these will hire internally. Others will turn to contractors—who are also locals.

Silicon Valley, with its high concentration of tech workers and ludicrous salaries, is very much the exception here, and a lot of HNers would do well to remember that, lest they end up looking as out of touch with the real world as Lucille Bluth asking about the price of a banana. [0]

[0] https://media1.giphy.com/media/yJu2jIQZgPubm/giphy.gif

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I live in NY, but am not part of the NY "tech scene," because I find they are not particularly welcoming to me. I won’t go where I’m not wanted.

Not really a big deal. I'm pretty cutting edge, on the frontend (native apps for Apple systems, in Swift), but a bit stodgier on the backend (I use PHP). I’m not surprised at all by the survey results.

PHP works great for me. If I need something different (not an issue, so far), I'll hire it in. I'm actually fairly good at big projects in PHP. My code is maintainable and high-quality. It may not be “leet” PHP, but it works well.

Here’s an article about this kind of thing, that is a bit “meta”: https://veekaybee.github.io/2019/05/10/java8/