[tedivm]

I find the average salary, especially for things like PHP, to be absolutely meaningless. There are PHP shops where people are just tweaking wordpress templates, and there are PHP devs who work for companies like Facebook. These groups have a huge difference in salary.

I'd love to see this data broken down into percentiles- what to the top 10% of positions in each language break down to? What about the bottom 10%?

[codegeek]

Not to mention that the article at the end says that is mixed with multiple countries including China etc. This chart is meaningless if you are mixing countries with different costs of living. A PHP dev even making 20K USD/Year in an Asian country is much better off than a dev making 70K in US (on an average).

[g105b]

Came to comment about PHP specifically. Even in my local town, a PHP salary can be anything from a blog mangler @ £20K to a bespoke tool developer @ £100K, both just happening to share the same programming language.

[brimble]

It's got a big range, but I bailed on the language years ago because I got sick of sifting through all the laughably-low salaries. I'd still do PHP if someone hired me for it (at non-joke rates, plus more on top for working with tech that's got the kind of trajectory and reputation PHP does) but I absolutely avoid looking at PHP jobs when searching, specifically because the floor on wages is so much lower than most languages so there are a ton of garbage jobs out there.

Certainly I'd skip right past a PHP job listing that didn't have an eye-catching salary listed prominently on it. Not having salary listed in general is annoying, but with most languages I can make a reasonable guess at where it'll be based on the company, location, and tech stack, and not be too far off. PHP, who knows. That "Senior Developer" position might turn out to only have a hiring budget of $60k (hahahaha good fucking luck with that). Or it might be $120k. Or $180k. PHP salaries are all over the place.

[tedivm]

Yeah I can relate- I run a couple of open source PHP projects that are fairly popular but other than that have mostly moved on to other languages. Salary is part of it, but I also found that there were a lot of characters in the PHP community who made dealing with the language less than pleasant.

[gregjor]

Agree. I’ve been making six figures (US$) working mainly with PHP for over a decade. Companies pay for results and business value, not for language expertise. If they happen to have a pile of PHP then I can live with that. Even maintaining corporate Wordpress sites is lucrative, and lots of big rich companies use WP.

I know people who have very basic PHP skills who make very little money, but that’s a function of their lack of technical skills and business experience, not the language.