Are good PHP developers really that hard to find?

Adz

Adz

Adz

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
10,277
Location
Berkshire
We're trying to hire a full time OO PHP developer at the moment. We're offering what I feel is a reasonable salary (£30k) but the quality of the applicants is very poor.

The candidates either seem to be able to list an impressive array of technologies but with no real commercial experience or they have plenty of experience but are stuck in the mindset of integrating OSCommerce/similar rather than developing proper bespoke applications. Nothing in their portfolio jumps out and says "wow, hire me".

I'm not even that bothered about a degree (I don't have a degree!). What I'm really looking for is a nerd, someone who lives and breathes PHP and who isn't afraid of getting their hands dirty with some seriously complex code (web hosting automation).

Do these people exist? Am I looking in the wrong places? Is the salary not sufficient? Can I be really cheeky and ask what kind of salaries those of you who are skilled at this level are demanding?

Thoughts from employers/staff would be of great interest :).
 
30k is a poor salary, I earn that and I'm only a lowly designer with a little dev. experience.

A PHP dev is not someone who's able to integrate pre-written PHP applications, you leave that to the peons (like me) and let the dev's get on with proper work.
 
Unfortunately, yes. We had the same problem while trying to find a PHP developer (£35-45k) probably 49/50 of the applicants we had were just terrible. PHP seems to be a language where there's a lot of people who 'sort of know it' (i.e. they can piece together a mostly-working website) but they're far from 'developers' :p. Especially the ones that only work with PHP and have little/no experience with good practices (e.g. no separation of concerns, no idea of code maintainability, everything is just lumped into one file, code duplication and everything.)

Don't give up though, there are definitely a load of good developers who also use PHP, they just take a while to find.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for your comments, guys.

PaulM, it's nice to know it's not our job advert at fault! We had a developer previously who used to code in such a manner. Everything he did generally worked but it was just 'messy'. I need someone who is nerdy to the point of OCD :).

I don't really fancy switching our entire platform to ASP .NET ;).
 
Personally I don't think there is anything wrong with the salary your offering (I assume it's outside London). PhP is pretty simple stuff, I'd be surprised you can't find a decent applicant for that money to be honest. Is there something particularly off putting about your company / the contract your offering?
 
There's nothing at all wrong with the job. I'd be happy with it myself if I weren't the MD!

There's no shortage of applicants, they're just all rubbish :p. Is PHP not taken seriously as a language to learn? Do all the really talented coders flock to ASP .NET or Java because it's seen as being more 'commercial'?
 
There are a lot of php programmers about that arnt worth their salt. There was an article on codinghorror about this. They suggest that it is even worse than your situation.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/02/the-nonprogramming-programmer.html

I think that as mentioned, there are a lot of people who consider themselves competent php developers when they can steal scripts and hack together a website that kind of works.

I have been doing php on and off for a few years and would say I am about a standard developer level. Most things I build are custom, I kind of dislike working on plugging in sites to ecommerce etc. I use the zend framework or a small framework I designed myself for most applications as it gives clear MVC separation.

I find that the best part of development is learning and developing skills. I cant remember who said it but the gist was that if you are not looking over your code from few months ago and seeing better ways to implement parts of it then you are not learning enough.

What age were most of these developers by the way and did many of them have degrees.
 
Adz said:
There's nothing at all wrong with the job. I'd be happy with it myself if I weren't the MD!

There's no shortage of applicants, they're just all rubbish :p. Is PHP not taken seriously as a language to learn? Do all the really talented coders flock to ASP .NET or Java because it's seen as being more 'commercial'?
Click to expand...

It's tricky, PhP (whilst being great for getting thinks up and running quickly) is one of the slowest languages about (in the last benchmark I saw it actually came bottom out of around 40+ languages for performance over a wide range of individual benchmarks), it is dog slow. For us it's far more an enabling technology rather than a language we'd advise our incomers to become masters at. So really we'd expect a working knowledge, more than simple website construction but less than it seems you are requiring. PhP is very much a prototyping system for us, and we'd probably then push on to JSP with some middleware software like JBoSS if we wanted to make the system available to a wider audience.
 
Hi, I'm a rubbish PHP dev... :D

So far all I've done is some customisation of OSCommerce, and a few strange little things I've coded myself. Right now my job involves no PHP, mainly generating web content, but I wouldn't mind doing some PHP as a job in the future.

The things is, PHP seems to be the oddball, I have not seen any courses or any certificates you can get to prove you can cut the mustard. I'd like to build apps from scratch, I really would, but I feel I'm taking stabs in the dark by just making random little programs for me own use. What would be the best to learn PHP in order to make useful commercial code? I could try and code my own shopping cart or forum, but it just seems like I'm re-inventing the wheel. Any suggestions for an interesting project I can do in my lunchhours at work?
 
Perhaps this is an odd idea, but don't specify you want a PHP specialist?

Since OO design and implementation is pretty similar across various languages a C++ dev would actually be well suites to doing PHP.

Someone who is a C++ engineer day to day but is willing to learn/knows about PHP could easily apply the same knowledge, and would be a good candidate - might take them a little while to get up to speed on the specifics of the language though.
 
PHP's ubiquity means it is the path of least resistance when starting out so it naturally scoops up more of the programming-newbies/less-committed people before other technologies have the chance.
 
We have enough problems just finding decent C# .NET developers.

Fact is, regardless of language, decent developers are very few and very far between!

Given that PHP is arguably quite a "niché" language, it must be even worse!
 
I think dave-lew99 has it right, you're probably after a PHP developer who has a background in 'serious' programming languages such as Java, C# or C++. However, if you haven't spotted it already, the problem with this is that they've likely been snapped up into a Java/C#/C++ role as it probably pays more than a PHP one.
 
I'm working full-time as a C#.net developer at the moment, but in the past I've done the same in PHP and a few other languages too. There are highly-paid jobs in all platforms, just as there are junior ones.

Similarly, a good developer is a good developer will tend to be platform-agnostic. Sure, there are some specialist areas on each but a decent developer will pick them up in no time.

Are you using an agency? If so, you could try not using them. I've had mixed success recruiting through them before - some seem to be incredibly poor, others acceptably good with no real pattern.

For £30k you should be able to get someone with a couple of years experience who is fairly good, or possibly a very talented but inexperienced graduate who will be attracted to the better-than-average entry salary. The latter may suit what you're really looking for more than the former, if you are willing to forego the risk of inexperience. It's always a tricky judgement call.

If you like, I'll happily take a look at your advert(s) and give you my thoughts both as a fairly experienced dev and also a recruiter. Sometimes there are some phrases and words that tend to jump out as being attractive :)

arty
 
I consider myself a competent PHP developer and have spent the last two and a half years dealing with a web hosting automation control panel and Cloud Computing Environment (not just in PHP).

I've been looking for a job recently (redundancy, last day this Weds) and it's been slim pickings. I would jump at the chance to earn £30k+. Most applications I send get ignored, and almost all of them are through agencies. Whenever I eventually do get an interview, generally it goes well and out of the 7 I've done I've had 5 job offers with the final two being interested enough to quiz me on salary expectations.

Each and every offer I've had starts with them asking my current salary and them adding a little on top when I've been naive enough to answer. Funnily enough, my first developer role (this is the one I'm leaving) I was paid £13k initially and I've learned that other companies very quickly decide your value based on your current salary almost exclusively.

I have a degree, I'm currently studying my Masters part time and I have commercial experience relevent to your interests. I would jump at the chance of what you're offering and I'm probably not the only one.

One thing I have noticed in my largely insigificant recruitment experience is that as PHP is an 'entry language' there is a large pool of people who can knock things up in PHP but generally lack any further knowledge of programming you might learn in say a degree or with experience. Yet it seems somehow possible for candidates to have both of the attributes mentioned and be no better off for it, myself being left gobsmacked on numerous occasions.

I do wonder, how are you conducting your search? From my experience recruitment agencies are a waste of time. You'd be better off using the money you pay them to top up the fund you're going to pay prospective candidates. Furthermore, I honestly believe a quick phone call to prospective candidates goes along way.

This is an interesting topic for me (for obvious reasons) and I'm genuinaly interested if you'd place in the a pool of worthless candidates you throw away. Are you willing to share any further information on how you judge candidates?
 
Last edited:
Guys, thanks for the input, your insights have been most useful, especially the suggestion of looking for a C++ developer and 'teaching' them PHP. This would widen the market quite a bit.

aln, with experience of hosting-related systems, you would very high on my shortlist but Scotland to Maidenhead is a bit of a commute! If re-locating is a possibility, you're more than welcome to come for an interview.

We weren't intending to use agencies but we're allowing a couple to send us CVs at the moment on a "no win, no fee" basis but with a very large fee if we do take one of their candidates. The candidates look good at first, until you see their portfolio and find out that the projects they've been involved in aren't in the same league as the kind of systems we're creating. Perhaps I'm being too picky but when I see Joomla mentioned I tend to push the CV over into the rejects pile.
 
From what i've heard from competent PHP coders is that it is very easy to write bad code and get it to work and what you end up with is slow, unsecure code. I also always thought that PHP is based on C++ anyway, so someone who is good at C++ should be able to code PHP well, however if you know C++ well, would you really want to code PHP all day? From what I've seen, good C++ coders earn a fair whack if they are good.
 
Adz said:
aln, with experience of hosting-related systems, you would very high on my shortlist but Scotland to Maidenhead is a bit of a commute! If re-locating is a possibility, you're more than welcome to come for an interview.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately relocating doesn't work for me. Luckily I believe I've managed to convice another ISP to hire me as a remote worker despite the fact they were looking for office workers. I'm suprised more companys do not consider such arrangements as this is something I personally find can be easily managed when considering these roles.

Adz said:
Perhaps I'm being too picky but when I see Joomla mentioned I tend to push the CV over into the rejects pile.
Click to expand...

To be fair, I agree with this. If all they have is a bunch of joomla / word press configurations, they're probably not the kind of developer you're looking for. However, such decisions do not always come from the developers themselves, unless they are managment level, thus it may be worth talking to them. These are the cases where a quick phone call can go a long way in my opinion.

Good luck anyways mate. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom