Blog
Ivo's blog
 |
ing. Ivo Jansch CTO |
 |
| Ivo is the CTO of Ibuildings. He implements company strategy regarding tools, technology and development processes. Ivo is the contact for several key customers and partners, and a regular speaker at conferences. |
Monday, August 10. 2009A look at the PHP job market
Last week, Cal Evans had an interesting post on this blog about an EDC study on the popularity of programming languages. In the comment section of that post, I had an interesting discussion with Bill Karwin, who suggested that when looking at the job market, PHP still seems less popular than other languages. It is not a surprise that Java and .NET have more jobs, considering they are general purpose languages while PHP's focus is on the web alone.
Later that week, I stumbled across an interesting press release by CV Screen on the job market in the UK. I'm not sure how easily this report translates to the rest of the world (comments are welcome), but since I can see similar trends in other countries, I thought I'd share it nonetheless. The article confirms Karwin's view that there is still more demand for .NET developers, but the main observation is that while demand for PHP jobs has dropped 19% in the past 12 months, .NET demand has dropped 49%.
I've already commented on how PHP would be better able to withstand the economic slowdown in my 2008 lookback post, and it's good to see that the CV Screen article is able to confirm this with actual numbers. The article quotes CV Screen's Director, Matthew Iveson: "There is still significantly more demand for .NET skills but over the last 12 months we have seen a shift towards Open Source technologies." Iveson mentions the reason for this shift: "One of the main reasons for this shift is the significant associated costs of .NET compared to PHP. This cost differential is also highlighted by CV Screen's IT Salary Survey which shows that on average a PHP developer in the UK earns £ 29,577, compared to £ 34,881 for a .NET developer". While I agree that the cost of deploying PHP applications is lower, I think this is more due to PHP's effectiveness as a language itself than the actual cost of salaries. Good PHP developers and good .NET developers have similar salaries, but since PHP is so easy to learn and get access to, there are more developers at the lower end of the spectrum, taking the average down. Also, .NET is typically used by larger organisations, taking the average up. (At Ibuildings the average salary for a PHP developer is higher than the salaries mentioned in CV Screen's press release, but since we employ a relatively large amount of senior developers, it is logical that we see different numbers than CV Screen. This however strengthens my point that the .NET and PHP salaries themselves aren't much different; it is possible to make an equally decent living from PHP.) The article ends with the following quote from Iveson: "We are noticing that more and more companies are looking at redeveloping and optimising their website and the cheapest way of doing this is with PHP. We would anticipate that given that .NET is typically used by larger organisations who are holding off on new projects, that PHP will continue to gain market share." With that conclusion, I wholeheartedly agree. If you see similar or different trends in other countries, I'd like to invite you to post a comment below. Share         Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
Hello,
We can observe the same thing in France, I was looking for a new mission 2 weeks ago, I'm PHP and JAVA Project Manager/Developer. I received more PHP opportunities than java, for big institutionals and web companies. Amazing to read you now when i was thinking like you for the last week.
Im from srilanka and new comer for php.
in my country only 6 gained ZCE so far. still lack job opportunities for PHP in Srilanka
Hi,
PHP coder seem like have more job opportunity nowadays. Plus it easier to learn. Good post anyway. From me doctors note
I believe there are quite a few UK based job search engines company like JobHits (http://www.ukjobsguide.co.uk/) which provides more advanced search, filtered options. Good thing is they are UK based rather than US own the world kind of company.
Wow!
I'm so glad I decided jump into PHP/SQL training with both feet last year. Mind you, PHP/SQL training is cheaper compared to most other programming courses. I'm receiving more requests from a broad range of SMEs asking me to optimise their websites to gain more local clients. Glad my economic "spider sense" is still going strong! Martin http://www.job-race.info |
