Why are good PHP developers so hard to find?

You've decided to dive into the startup adventure? The little lightbulb that lit up over your head is a real innovation, something never seen before, an out-of-the-ordinary product or service? You've convinced investors to back you? Congratulations!

If you're reading this article, your business is probably built on an application. As a digital startup, you need to start on solid foundations. After a comparative analysis of existing technologies, you choose PHP for its robustness and for the dynamism of a community you can lean on.

You still have one challenge, though: build your team by identifying the developers with the skills that will let you take off.

#Tension on the digital talent market

Demand for the most talented tech profiles is exploding. It's estimated to double every four years. The most talented sometimes delete their LinkedIn profile, so heavy are the solicitations of all kinds. This tension explains the absence of quality applications you've probably noticed.

On top of that, the digital giants don't hide that talent acquisition is, for them, a way to drain the market and choke off any innovation that doesn't come from their own ranks.

#A gigantic community

The PHP developer population in France is the largest of any programming language. It's the most represented, with about 35% of French tech projects built in PHP, while the populations favoring JavaScript and Java come close behind at around 18% and 17% of users. C# developers — formerly the vast majority thanks to Microsoft's reign — are now becoming fewer and fewer thanks to the explosion of open-source software.

But if the elephant is so prized by the developer community, it's for several reasons.

Large community

That's the user's main advantage (tens of thousands of libraries, plenty of docs & tutorials, someone has surely already run into your problem, etc.) but also the main drawback for the recruiter who has to find the goose that lays the golden eggs in this entire community.

Economical

Free and requiring no usage license, PHP fits the spirit of solidarity and mutual help among developers and thus attracts many users — beginners as well as seasoned ones.

Easy to pick up

The simplicity of this language is a plus that quantitatively attracts new code artisans.

Performance and speed

It's because frameworks like Laravel and Symfony make PHP one of the fastest & most efficient languages that several of the largest high-traffic platforms like Facebook or Wikipedia use it.

The training landscape

The web training sector now lets anyone retrain in just 3 months toward web development jobs. Developer is a job that demands personal research, technology watch, and above all experience — and it's for that reason that these training programs quickly swell the ranks of the developer population while lowering its average quality.

Several factors make this language strongly attractive without necessarily bringing quality with them. That's what's driving the average level down among PHP developers.

#A rich ecosystem that blurs the lines

The PHP language — like many others — can be used in three different ways:

1. Pure = no framework
2. Under a proprietary framework (called an in-house framework)
3. Under an open-source framework

Where some languages offer a few frameworks, the trunked language has a whole array: 20+ on Wikipedia's (non-exhaustive) list. You'll find the major dominants — Symfony, Zend, and Laravel — but also the smaller stars like CakePHP, CodeIgniter, or Yii, which keep their heads above water, and finally the newcomers like Phalcon, known for its performance and developed under Zephir, a language derived from PHP.

This volume of technologies pushes developers to specialize in a framework so they become recognized experts. This diversity of development tools within the PHP community itself splits it into "specialties" that compartmentalize your search for developers: if you get your hands on the PHP developer of your dreams, they still have to be operational on the framework you use… STOP!

This is often where the mistake is made… You should know that a good PHP developer isn't confined to one framework. You still have to identify the developer's background to confirm they can adapt and ramp up, but don't let yourself stop at the absence of one tech on the targeted candidate's resume: you'll only make your task harder!

"You should know that a good PHP developer isn't confined to one framework."

#After the tech… there's still the human

You've found the ideal PHP developer? 7 years of XP including 4 on the Laravel framework? REST API, clean, maintainable, and scalable code? Agile methods and lead experience? Great! Sounds like we've got our person! Only now you still have to verify this gem's human skills.

A "good" PHP developer must — as for other web languages — fit with your company's values and those of your management.

Collective

A developer often works alone in front of their machine, but rarely alone on a project. Pair programming or code review, understanding and communication are essential. Their code has to blend in with that of their current colleagues and be easy to pick up by their successors.

Lazy

Surprising, isn't it? A lazy developer will do everything not to repeat functions. They will therefore automate redundant tasks and create tools that save them precious time… and therefore advance your project!

Perfectionist

A perfectionist developer writes clean, well-documented code that's easy to maintain over the long term. A perfectionist dev makes sure their code is validated by unit tests but also that it's scalable and robust so it doesn't crash at the first traffic spike!

Curious

The golden quality of a developer, it's the guarantee of growth and autonomy. The curious developer will dig through the web until they find a solution and will do a lot of "personal" tech-watching to constantly grow their skills. Since technological progress moves faster than their learning, a good developer always has more to learn than what they already know!