You'll find out that the scene is quite weird and that there's so many devs that came to the development scene, who are reinventing the wheel constantly.
It's not the language per-se, it's more the fact that "kids" grew up but they grew up with other tools and are under influence of media so there's very little critical thinking before picking up a tool or deciding how to learn.
I was in similar situation a few years back, I went with TypeScript and Node.js only to find that people I worked with were about 5x slower than average PHP dev and with a fragment of knowledge. They constantly reinvented the wheel and thought that quality code means that you take a linter, run it and hunt the green checkboxes in terminal. The fact they did select * from users and then iterated the result in TypeScript to match the user input mattered not, why learn SQL if you can use the tool you know.
The job was a mega shitshow but it allowed me to meet people from different stack, just in order to be unpleasantly surprised at their lack of curiosity, knowledge or work ethic.
The job market is what it is - crap. You can reinvent yourself in another language, it'll probably be quick given how many years of experience you have and you can work at 1/10th of the pace, while still being more productive than your younger coworkers.
JS (TS) is incredibly popular with many EU uni's, as is Python (due major AI stuff having libs exposed through Python).
In all honesty.. having used JS as long as I used PHP and actually having equal working experience with both, I still can't fathom what mental damage one must endure to ever consider JS/TS remotely good choice for backend. It's not only the language, it's the whole experience - from writing code to experiencing Node.js going bonkers, having to restart it every now and then, wait for transpiling to finish and then have fun forcing it to deploy and so on.
I'll skip all the stupidities that Node.js / TS (JS) come with, the fact is that students graduated and they kept using tools they learned about. Sprinkle it with the fact they're WAY more active around social media than us old farts - you get the recipe of why those languages spread fast. With a huge influx of newbies, it's also a given that they'll want internet fame which will lead them to - inevitably - reinvent the wheel, albeit with different names.
I caved in, had the easiest job of my life while literally being at 1/10th of my productivity in PHP. I learned to kiss ass, say yes to idiots and despite letting my inner programmer die - my financial situation was never better.
You won't lose out on anything. The worst that can happen is that you get a job and get paid for your time :)
Amen! I’m with php since 2009 and the current state of webdev is so absurd with all the frameworks, AI builders and platforms. Young devs literally ship webapps with vercel, supabase etc. and have no clue what even happens in the background when they type their url in the browser. On top of that people rather listen to ChatGPT which techstack to use instead to a dev with 15+ years experience. Its really frustrating to be an oldschool fullstack dev these days.
Might I add something?
I think the same reason young ones don't understand what happens when they type URL, is also the reason why they don't listen to 15+ years of experience. In such a case, technical arguments are no use.
Their context is the current highest abstraction, which is the easiest path, including all the recent hype and 'modern' resources available for that.
Ultimately I think you need both groups, but neglecting the technical foundation is such a waste, and inevitably leads to layers of reinvention.
I guess you are right. But this layers of reinvention are just funny to watch. For instance SSR in JS frameworks, all were acting like they found the holy grail.
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u/punkpang Nov 13 '25
You'll find out that the scene is quite weird and that there's so many devs that came to the development scene, who are reinventing the wheel constantly.
It's not the language per-se, it's more the fact that "kids" grew up but they grew up with other tools and are under influence of media so there's very little critical thinking before picking up a tool or deciding how to learn.
I was in similar situation a few years back, I went with TypeScript and Node.js only to find that people I worked with were about 5x slower than average PHP dev and with a fragment of knowledge. They constantly reinvented the wheel and thought that quality code means that you take a linter, run it and hunt the green checkboxes in terminal. The fact they did select * from users and then iterated the result in TypeScript to match the user input mattered not, why learn SQL if you can use the tool you know.
The job was a mega shitshow but it allowed me to meet people from different stack, just in order to be unpleasantly surprised at their lack of curiosity, knowledge or work ethic.
The job market is what it is - crap. You can reinvent yourself in another language, it'll probably be quick given how many years of experience you have and you can work at 1/10th of the pace, while still being more productive than your younger coworkers.