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?