[arenaninja]

I believe the latter point is the one he's making, but from reading his letter I gathered the former. His cheeky remark on Node.js, etc. made it seem more plausible for me (until I read his last paragraph).

As a 'PHP Dev' who plays with a number of things outside of my job, I agree with the overall sentiment, but I'm not sure that he's getting the message he wants across.

[lugg]

Whatever message it is it doesn't make much sense to me. We know, companies know, and even recruiters know we can pick up other languages at the drop of a hat. The reason they state the language / flavor in the role title is so that it is clear to all involved, us as php devs can make an entirely informed decision not to take the conversation further in an absolute instant, as can recruiters when they see php developer on my linked in prpfile header. I used to get a heap of java job recruitment mail before I changed it. You know why? I used to do a bit of java dev back in the day and have a lot of endorsements in it. It wasn't clear to anyone what I was interested in or what I wanted to deal with.

Secondly its not career limiting at all I can call my recruiter tomorrow and have five java/.net/node/whatever dev interviews setup over the next week all I have to say is I'm looking to move into java again and am a bit bored of php. They dont care as long as you have skills in it and can prove it. The only slightly limiting thing may be they are worried about ramp up time of productivity which is only really going to be an issue if you're in a shaky negotiating position already ie they aren't 100% on you as a developer period.