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Companies that use PHP and pay well
50 points by danjfoley on Nov 2, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 48 comments
Looking to make a move, looking to find a list of companies with PHP as their backend. I'm a senior team lead now, but I just don't get paid enough. I want to make 170k base at least with bonus and equity and all that great stuff.

I've got the usual linked in and job site searches going, but maybe there is a better way of going out it. And yes I like PHP. I have worked with the slim framework using packages from symfony and others to build up what we need. I've used straight up larvel and straight up symfony.

So where can a senior PHP dev work and make a good deal of money? Etsy seems to come up a lot. I've got my eye on their job postings.




Why focus on PHP?

I've been at this game long enough now to recognize that it's more valuable to think of being at a "layer" of the tech stack. In your case with PHP I'm guessing you're part of the web stack. There are plenty of languages for which you'd have plenty of pre-existing web experience that would make it easy to develop in. I'm mostly in the web stack as well and I've used several different languages at different companies and really never cared.


I've been at this game long enough now (over 20 years professionally!) to learn that it takes time to gain an expert-level proficiency at any new language, and that no modern language exists in isolation -- it is also its community, packages, libraries, and frameworks. I've also learned that there's value in doing work you enjoy.

PHP is the one language where everyone feels comfortable suggesting changing to some other language. I should have followed HN's advice and become a novice Ruby on Rails developer 10 years ago, and then a novice Golang developer, and now I could be a novice NodeJS developer! If only...

There's nothing wrong with asking around to see if anybody's looking for a strong [language] dev. I just wish it were possible to see the word "php" in an HN thread without it being followed by some subset of the same tedious replies.


I love HN but you are right, and I feel like I can never mention the language I use at my job the most because I'd get the same unsolicited replies about how every other users' preferred language is better than mine.

I wish that culture would just die already and we could have more honest discussions about actual use-cases where one particular language might be a better choice.


Where do I work that uses..PHP? And I like PHP. Yeah people love to hate it. It's a modern language. It's almost trendy for people to hate it.


> Why focus on PHP?

Because he likes PHP :)


I like PHP.


If you squint, Meta. A large part of the codebase is in Hack. It started its life as PHP and still has a lot of the heritage there. Slack also uses Hack.

Full disclosure: I work for Meta.


+1 to this as a former Meta employee although I don't think you need to squint. That being said, if you're good, you should realize that the code is less important than the grasp of concepts, patterns, data structures, algorithms.


As someone who has wrote PHP as part of a job in the 90s, the 00s, and the 10s, and at least seen some Hack at Facebook (I think I wrote a tiny amount of code in Hack, but it wasn't in the main repo), Hack code, especially the idiomatic code in the main repo, is pretty detached from PHP.

Yes, there's $'s everywhere. Otherwise, it looks more like a Java codebase than a PHP code base, IMHO. Although, maybe I've mostly seen PHP code bases where there's less abstraction/OO::Explosion, I've never worked long term on PHP code with an opensource framework, and I didn't like what I saw when I had to look at things in those frameworks. IMHO, that makes for too much hidden logic, and makes it hard to understand what's happening, and why it takes 20-50ms to output a hello world.


I don't want to work for meta. I hear the work life balance is t that great.


Automattic

https://github.com/Automattic?q=&type=all&language=php&sort=


Automattic will not tell you the salary range you might be in. There is no way to find out what others in the company earn. After your trial project is done - and it might not even be in PHP - you will be told your salary. No negotiations, take it or leave it.

Automattic does not offer anything even close to Etsy.


I work at Automattic and it's not true that there is no salary negotiation, I'm living proof that there is.


Do you have any news to share about the recent dismissal of an entire team?


Yeah I feel like Etsy is gonna be the place, and I have a person who can get me referrals so I'll get an interview, just waiting for a position to open up at my level.


Kind of a typical PHP developer post unfortunately, it's the only language where I see people say 'I've been here long enough to know better'

That's the thing though, tech changes way too fast to say that. As soon as I see somebody say that in a interview, I assume that they are not even up to date in the language they claim to use so well, because they are likely to use it like they did 5 years ago.

I guess the key to more money today is staying flexible. I'm sure you can find well paying PHP jobs, it just makes it harder to say it so bluntly.

Good luck with the chase !


But we currently make most of our income with php, but we are a company that focuses on fixing legacy and php now has so much legacy that companies face very expensive outages and scaling issues because their codebase is 20 years old, but large enough have to repeat to consulting companies who take a look that, no, not a rewrite at this point. We fix and update the old code and get paid very well for it. There are millions of companies with codebases (also in other languages, but only with php there are enough for a few decades work; people are making new bad software as well !) in different layers of the company.


Sounds like interesting problems to solve, are you looking for more people?


I could offer options, but would need more info from you:

Are you looking for remote work only? If not, would you be willing to relocate for a local (hybrid/on-site job)?

Do you live in a H, M or L COL area?

A resume would be ideal, but if not, the following can help:

What kind of work have you done over the past few years (e.g. industries, company sizes/stages, type of products)?

What other technologies do you regularly work with?


Honestly, in my experience most the "good" PHP jobs tend to end up in the start-up space, where pace of development/sheer ability to get stuff done (PHP's strengths) are the primary drivers. As you move to bigger companies, more specialised languages tend take precedence as they can afford the increased dev time in order to achieve greater efficiency/throughput.

I still love PHP, as I like solving problems and pragmatically PHP is really really good at that. But at the end of day, everything is a trade off, and the trade-offs of PHP don't make sense everywhere.

In terms of bigger places, facebook still hire plenty of PHP devs, Slack as well - or at least they used too. Bumble (and the network of related sites) was heavily PHP a few years back too. Etsy you already mentioned. Quite a few "non-php" places still have a fair PHP estate that needs looking after too, even if they are slowly migrating away from them.


Facebook is the obvious first example that comes to mind, but given how many other languages they probably use I don't know if you could be sure of getting on a PHP project.


Where I can see a sample of your PHP work?


What about just emailing them? With your experience you probably get to be heard at least...


I wanted to suggest Etsy but I saw you already mentioned it.


Mailchimp


Ask HN:


I'm scratching my head how this type of post "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

Are there other readers here, like me, who would love to see a HN that is way less mainstream?


What are some examples of way-less-mainstream posts that you think are (or would be) good for HN?


I think job market discussions are a staple of Hacker News and I like it that way. In fact, it seems the site is mostly monetized with job offers… Hackers gotta eat too.


I'm eating. I have always been able to eat.

Never did I have to take a job for that.

In the beginning, that was the main point of Hacker News. How to build stuff yourself, in a better, more efficient way than the old school "work for the man" approach. Roll up your sleeves, leave the beaten track and achieve higher efficiency than the mainstream.

It was called "Startup News" back then. Then PG renamed it to "Hacker News" because he wanted it to be more focussed on amazing things than just building startups.

Looking for a job in a big company seems to be 180° into the other direction to me.


You might prefer this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38101613, or this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38107078, or this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38082938, among others, all currently on the front page. There's really no need to make this particular thread the one that you think most epitomizes the decline of HN.

HN's always been a mix of interests, what with it being a website frequented by a mix of people and all.


> I'm eating. I have always been able to eat. Never did I have to take a job for that.

How? Do you farm for yourself on your own land?


Yeah...I've occasionally not had paying work and I was not eating for long stretches of those times due to lack of money.


You were not eating, literally speaking? Or just eating fewer calories?


Both. Low calories most days and sometimes 1-3 days without food. Went from 200 lbs to 150 lbs in about 3 months.


The intellectually stimulating part is in the comments (which is typical really).

Any discussion about PHP is actually, since the language occupies the most tragic of niches: "very productive and with a low barrier to entry, but badly paid".

A while ago I did a side gig in PHP - it was surprisingly easy to get back to it after more than a 10 year break and I made it worth for me, but my client was not used to such rates.


lobste.rs exists :)


Ah, well that one is very simple. PHP isn't worth that.


It's literally 80% of the internet


And why does it matter if companies using it don't tend to pay well? Every single website is HTML, good luck finding a job writing just HTML.


There are devs on Reddit killing it writing just HTML/CSS.


I'd like to see your source on this


And once you factor in Sturgeon's Law, the parent is correct.


Downvote me all you want. I'm right. Learn Java if you want to make $170k.


There are better languages for making big money as a salaryman than PHP.

The arguments that PHP is still modern/relevant are more arguments for its use in getting things done. If you just want to maximize income as an employee, learn Rust, Go, or Java. (Or Swift or C# if you wanna go into Those industries and stick with dead-end fanservice languages.)

Furthermore, if you’re a senior team lead, you’re a manager, not a programmer. Why do you care which language is used at that point? UML is UML.


> if you’re a senior team lead, you’re a manager, not a programmer.

Pretty sure there is no hard definition of lead programmer.

For example on my current team the lead also programs a lot. We go to him for questions and maybe code review. UML comes from the architects.

Might be similar in OPs case.


Over 80% of the internet is written in PHP


20% of the internet generates 80% of the revenue, and the salary for the webdev. Guess how much of that 20% is PHP? And how much of the 80% is PHP?




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