PHP is his only language, right? He's in the same situation as Perl-only developers a couple of decades ago.
PHP is a fine language for a lot of cases. It's been a long time since it made sense to pay someone $150K to use it. Anonymous Indians is the AI he's been up against for a long time. Not to be racist of course, just pointing out there's massive labor arbitrage opportunities especially once you allow Remote work. You could hire an entire team of people for the same cost. He's making himself compete with the world with no significant advantage and he's expecting top dollar. American salaries only make sense when they require onsite work or are specialized/cutting-edge in some way, PHP is the most commoditized skill set there is.
I don't think that is racist at all.
A very good friend started an outsourcing firm here in Mexico 10 years ago. We (mexicans) were the cheaper alternative for US companies building software solutions.
Well, a couple of years ago they outsourced a lot of jobs from Mexico to Vietnam, because they were 1/3rd of the cost of a software dev in here . We were Out-Outsourced!
It's the fact of the market, and will continue unless the US government intervenes somehow.
I have been on the "lucky" receiving side of the issue. I've worked remotely for several US companies. They pay half of a US Director/VP of Eng for one; And I earn 3x the normal Mexico salary.
And as you say, right now , it doesn't make sense to pay US salaries for PHP development. Shit, I've outsourced Sr. QA automation to Argentina at $10 usd the hour (via upwork).
Yeah i feel like this guy posts a lot of doomer stuff and it isn't as introspective as it could be. i also feel like posting doomer stuff is popular and so he is trying to monetize the doomer mentality. That leads me to kind of think what he says has less value because i just see any kind of monetization scheme like that as a somewhat implicit bias to whatever is being said. you can't be anti-doomer if you make money on your substack talking about doomer ideas. but also, i feel bad for the guy he lost his job that had a nice salary and didn't find a new one. that must suck. But then I wonder, is that exactly what he is trying to capitalize on? And then you must think, is this what the world has become now that everything is commoditized and we are all part of the Attention economy? Is everyone trying to make money on everything and thus no one is really to be believed about anything? That's one reason why i deleted most social media. It all became a grift and none of it had anything to do with being social.
I've been off socials and on forums for 8+ years now for the same reason. I share similar sentiment as Bizzy's sibling reply. I say these things because lately I've been thinking about lot about dead internet theory and how strongly some believe it.
One of the most profound realizations I've had lately is that the perception of the medium of communication itself is a well that can be poisoned with artificial interactions. Major empahsis on perception. The meer presence of artifical can immediately taint real interactions; you don't need a majority to poison the well.
How many spam calls does it take for you to presume spam? How many linkedin autoreply ai comments does it take to presume all comments are ai? How many emails before you immediately presume phishing? How many rage baiting social posts do you need to see before you believe the entire site is composed of synthetic engagement? How many tinder bots do you need to interact with before you feel the entire app is dead? How many autodeny job application responses until you assume the next one is a ghost job posting? How many interactions with greedy people does it take to presume that it's human nature?
This is beautiful. One thing I'd like to add to the list is:
How many AI cheaters do you need to catch on the technical phone screening interview to incorporate a habit of doing IRL CAPTCHA challenges?
It used to be that you wouldn't be aware of what is going on in RU-net [1] or PTT [2] because you simply were not a Russian speaker or you weren't someone living in Taiwan speaking Chinese (yes modern Taiwanese people use a CLI app to login to a BBS in 2025, you can also do this with a web browser but where is the fun in that). So you simply were unaware that they even existed probably or if you do, you are like me and can only kind of speak Russian and get some of the memes, or you simply know about PTT because your Taiwanese friend told you about it.
But now, everything is bifurcated within languages because there is orders of magnitude more content being generated and that content is algorithmically delivered to your eyes and ears based on your interactions with whatever platform you use (e.g., instagram, reddit) and maybe even across multiple platforms. So you likely don't see anything related to Kim Kardashian because you aren't flipping channels anymore through what is essentially "static" content. Instead you are scrolling a feed designed for you and you have never indicated you wanted to keep up with the Kardashians based on what you like and dislike in your feed.
And so I think this bifurcation is combined with this kind of oily, artificial interactions you are talking about, and that makes the internet feel dead. Because the second you have a live experience, like going to a jazz bar without your phone and just hanging out and listening, everything feels so alive and real and amazing.
This all reminds me of these series of commercials by AT&T that were called like, the "You will" commercials or something like that and they were narrated by Tom Selleck [3]. The commercials show all these ways to use technology, that AT&T promised to deliver to you, to connect with both information and each other. Jenna Elfman sees her baby on a video phone, some kid sits in an online lecture and talks to his teacher, some dude sends a fax from the beach. All these things are of course possible today, but most of the time it really doesn't make you feel connected. I want to hold my baby not see it on video phone. I want to interact with my students in class not respond to their comments on some internet forum the university pays for. I want to discuss with my colleagues and build cool stuff together not sit in my office while they hang out at the beach. Everything promised in the AT&T "You will" commercials now exists. But none of it fulfills the promise that AT&T was making, that this would all make us feel more connected.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runet [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvZ-667CEdo
Doesn't sound like it, no.
> ...when they learn I was developing advanced php web apps when they were in diapers. As if that has any negative relevance towards _the modern technologies i’ve gone on to learn and be experienced with in more recent years_.
(Emphasis mine)
I worked with PHP back in 2014 and nobody was building anything in PHP that could be called advanced by today's standards. That language barely had decent backend framework options and we're talking just 10 years ago.
If this person has been working for 20 years, they were definitely working at the time when MD5 hashing was considered security in the PHP community and the best technology that community could muster at the time was the horrifying architecture of WordPress.
I'm sorry, I'm sure this fella is a good engineer but you could not convince me that back in the day PHP had anything going on for it except for low barrier of entry.
by 'advanced', i simply meant complex web apps that are more than CRUD / more than wordpress. to take one that comes to mind, i built this server job that synced with an old school phone center CRM for a home security corp, and it coordinated all these events and updates to happen at scheduled times for customers getting home security systems installed
Perl also destroyed itself by growing an arrogant community that would eagerly race to be the first to shout "RTFM" at a modest inquiry by someone new to the language.
That was not my experience (at least with perlmonks) back when I used Perl, but maybe I'm mis-remembering things.
I think part of Perl's downfall was that TMTOWTDI became too many ways to do one thing, and it was too easy to create terse, unreadable code. Basically, the opposite direction of modern concepts like "idiomatic Go".
I'm sad that Perl is dying while people are still writing fucking bash scripts in production code. (Perl is still better than that!)
Huh. As someone who worked in Perl a very long time ago, my strong impression was always that Perl died almost entirely due to Perl 6/Second System Syndrome; Perl 5.x became, implicitly, the already-outdated thing, and yet Perl 6 wouldn't meaningfully exist for like two decades.
There was that, too. But I remember people being happy to use the latest Perl 5 and expecting it to be continually updated (which is still is today). Perl 6 was considered a different language altogether at best, and vapourware at worst.
Still, I can definitely see someone new to the language thinking Perl 5 was a dead end.
Not only PHP: "modern technologies I've gone on to learn and be experienced with in more recent years."
Although, there's a Lisp-inspired PHP called Phel: https://phel-lang.org/
And PHP typing with version 7.4.0: https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.declarations.ph...
PHP isn't terrible any more. Necessarily, anyway. I wrote a PR for Symfony last year, it was quite a nice experience.
But if the only language he posts about is PHP, I think the source if his hiring problems is clear.
PHP is now good enough that I think you can trivially learn another language if you know PHP.
That's not really the case with Perl. And I love Perl, I really do. But it's just too wacky, too wild-west, too out there.
PHP is basically C# at this point with a bit more runtime bugs.
Yeah, modern PHP is very different from the old ugh. Still not my favourite language, but it's decent now. Just another day at the office.
But what do you think — was the blogger we're discussing was on the forefront of the PHP change (rewriting the old ugh code at his last job), or is his idea of PHP the old style? Just based on the way he writes, what do you guess?
i have a BACKGROUND in php in the caveman times, but i have been working fullstack typescript/GCP since 2017