Faultd.

I've been pondering lately about PHP and its place in the world. It's an infamous and imperfect language yet so much of the web runs on it, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. That said, I do think I have a pretty good idea on what the future looks like for those who are banking on PHP as their career.

While PHP, especially in the last few years, has been making huge strides in improving its warts and catching up with modern programming languages, I don't see many greenfield projects that start out with PHP. In fact, I see less and less job opportunities for PHP developers in general, especially those who are exclusively PHP and not full-stack developers.

From my experience and observations it seems PHP is almost exclusively used for low-budget projects e.g small business websites, blogs, and the like, and whatever bigger more complex projects that run on PHP are almost always legacy projects that lack a budget or motivation for a rewrite. This explains also why the average PHP developer salary is one of the lowest in the industry.

My prediction is that if you're a PHP developer right now, your salary will most likely start to increase soon, as universities no longer teach PHP and the number of new PHP developers is decreasing, while the footprint of PHP projects is still huge. PHP will enter its "COBOL phase", where most of the projects will be maintenance of legacy projects. This is good news in that you can make more money, possibly.

Now whether you can sustain an entire programming career on that I do not know, and that depends on how far along in your career you are. If you're a junior, I would recommend migrating to something that doesn't lose 2-5% of its popularity each year (according to StackOverflow surveys from 2020 onward), and even more I'd recommend learning programming fundamentals to such a degree that languages no longer really matter and become easy to pick up - that's how you become an actual software engineer and not just a {language} developer.