[codegeek]

"because in my experience I haven’t actually seen a single php developer "

With all due respect, that is one hell of a bubble :). Plenty of companies use PHP (not just WordPress) and there are plenty of PHP devs who work with core, symfony, Laravel etc.

PHP is battle tested and even though it has its quirks, you can never go wrong with it if you are looking to build a web application.

P.S: We are hiring web developers for our company and PHP experience is preferred considering our stack.