Can you survive as a PHP Web Developer in 2023?

PHP, thanks to Laravel and Symfony is thriving nowadays, especially within startup communities and not only.

Yes, it's still a good choice, but you have to build yourself a nice resume with multiple projects to present yourself.

I have noticed more and more companies are not advertising the traditional way, but do so via their own websites.

A couple of minutes ago I found the following website https://uppbeat.io/ which at its footer you can find a careers section, which leads to https://musicvine.com/

They currently have a senior backend developer position open which happens to be a Symfony!

https://musicvine.com/careers/senior-backend-developer

Give it a try, you have nothing to worry about.

Good Luck!

P.S.: You can follow another route if you like: go to https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php and look at the websites listed in there; check them for careers or how else they name it, be it jobs, vacancies, and so forth; you cannot imagine how many Laravel positions exist out there!

Sure, plenty of work. PHP powers a large majority of web sites. Almost all of my customers use PHP to some degree, often exclusively.

A big portion of the PHP stats (number of web sites using it) come from WordPress. While WP sites need less development than sites built from scratch, or with Laravel, they still need maintenance, custom code, and system administration. Someone who can keep a WP site humming and enhance it can find plenty of work.

If you can't find suitable work that has very little to do with a programming language. Businesses don't need more PHP code. They need people who can add business value and deliver on requirements. Programming languages are almost incidental in the big picture. My advice is to focus on selling yourself based on the value you offer to an employer or customer, not on a language.

Half of the worlds websites (excuse me, webAPPS) still run Wordpress. PHP as a language might be approaching something of a renaissance (just a feeling) thanks to recent upgrades in the language as well as frameworks like Laravel.

So yeah, I'd say there's plenty of work to go around as far as PHP developer is concerned. Keep looking. You'll get there.

Yes, I used to be. I was remote and made (before leaving) a bit over 100k USD, so their are solid jobs out there. There's still a lot of software running PHP. There are two (probably more) types of PHP projects though:

1. Well architected and testable code that is essentially dynamic Java and gets to have all of the great additions that PHP has added over the years.

2. Adhoc PHP scripts strewn about a file system that call into the DB directly or with a bad abstraction layer that's untestable.

The former is a great experience. The latter is not. I moved to different languages not out of hate for PHP, but due to the latter type being too common and me being stuck in one. I realized I'm so much happier working in a code base that has structure and is testable.

I think OP's comment is more of a reflection of the current state of the job market than a commentary on PHP. Many, many thousands of talented laid off people are looking for jobs in tech right now and having far more trouble than in normal times.

PHP is still probably among the most widely used web languages: it's just not trendy on HN for differing reasons.

Specialize in something. Consider Drupal. (D7 is going EOL https://www.drupal.org/psa-2023-06-07) and will result in quite a few sites that will either need to be rebuilt or migrated.

Search on LinkedIn, tons of jobs in PHP. I just hired a PHP Developer.

As stefanos82 said, if you don't know Laravel and/or Symfony then consider learning them.

Yes. Our SAAS does low 7 figures on PHP. Learn Laravel framework as it has a good ecosystem right now and various tooling around it.

Yes, but start learning Laravel . . . today!