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.

Wow, what a rollercoaster ride 2008 was; in so many ways. The world faced the biggest financial crisis most of us have ever seen in our lives, the balance of power in the world shifted significantly and fuel prices both had an all time high and a 5 year low in the same year. Crazy times. And I think we haven't seen the end of it yet.

It's hard to analyse what the exact effect of all of this is on our own industry. If you look at TechCrunch's layoff tracker, it is clear that IT was not left unaffected. Several companies that are close to the PHP community have seen layoffs: SUN, current owner of MySQL, laid off about 5000 jobs; Yahoo, the biggest PHP user on the planet, laid off 1500 and even Zend was troubled by layoffs this year.