In a dilemma, where should PHP go?

ByLeonidMamchenkov, June4th, 2008 in the past six months or even longer, I am looking for PHP developers for at least three companies. I have talked with some programmers, received some feedback, and even interviewed several people, but I have never recommended anyone. Before I explain it, do not criticize me for a high requirement. I am not looking

By Leonid Mamchenkov, June 4th, 2008 over the past six months or even longer, I have been searching for PHP developers for at least three companies. I have talked with some programmers, received some feedback, and even interviewed several people, but I have never recommended anyone. Before I explain it, do not criticize me for a high requirement. I am not looking

By Leonid Mamchenkov, June 4th, 2008

Over the past six months or even longer, I have been searching for PHP developers for at least three companies. I have talked with some programmers, received some feedback, and even interviewed several people, but I have never recommended anyone.

Before I explain it, do not criticize me for a high requirement. I am not looking for rocket researchers or high-end developers. I am not even looking for a senior PHP developer. It is enough to have enough level to maintain both CakePHP and WordPress projects. What's more, they are still open-source.

I understand that not everyone has used CakePHP and WordPress for development. I also understand that it takes some time to get familiar with the code and read relevant documents. I know that not everyone is familiar with open-source software development models, and not everyone works in the team. Therefore, being familiar with version control software, document editing tools, bug tracking, and so on is not within the scope of requirements.

But what I don't understand is, why do people who claim to be using PHP and MySQL and have developed at least two web projects, but cannot write the simplest code with paper or pen? Why are there no "Senior web engineers" who have years of PHP development and team leadership experience facing a development environment without Dreamweaver? Developers with at least one bachelor's degree in computer science are still advocating Bubble sorting? Why don't programmers start telling potential employers about their interview experiences instead of answering technical questions? Why are the technical staff with several years of experience in teamwork at the interview confused even if they are asked the simplest technical questions?

If you want to know the answers to these questions, here is an example. For example, there is a simple question: "What is the difference between stack (also called FILO) and queue (also called pipe or FIFO ?" The answer is clearly hidden in the question, isn't it?

These applicants who claim to have several years of development and project experience often encounter some simple program problems during interviews. For example, the following question: "Use PHP to create a list of characters containing names, ages, and Gender. Add three samples to the list. Then, a list is sorted alphabetically by the male name in the list. If you do not use the database, extra points will be added ." Each candidate has only one piece of paper, one pen, and unlimited Answer time. But in the past six months, I have never seen anyone hand-written code to solve these problems.

All our recruitment websites, newspapers, communities and job introducers are all looking for candidates, but none of them are successful. Now we only need three people, but there will be more vacancies in the near future.

This is like the human resources in Cyprus (an island of Eastern Mediterranean with a population of about 0.82 million) where demand is greater than supply, but it still doesn't help. So I also want you to understand how I feel.

If you want to discuss Cyprus, a country that is small in the field of science and technology, you should wait. Last year I went to the Greek blogger camp and this year I went to the next generation network conference in Amsterdam. During these two conferences, I talked with friends from Europe and the United States. I have also visited communities and recruitment websites in various regions. I feel that this is not just the same as the problems faced by Cyprus. Of course, because of its geographical and scientific and technological status, the situation in Cyprus is indeed more serious than in other regions.

Now, I am still spending a lot of time looking for PHP developers, but I am also thinking about the root cause of this problem. PHP seems to be a very popular language, but why do you encounter this problem when looking for a good PHP developer? I come up with a theory that may be called a series of assumptions and speculation.

PHP is an ugly language

I personally know some excellent developers and I have read blog articles from more excellent developers. Although they often use PHP and some still use PHP as the basic language for daily development, I never remember any of them saying they like PHP. If there is a possibility of a development language selection in a new project, they will select Java, C, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails, Haskell, and so on, but they will not select PHP. PHP has its advantages, but it is not a beautiful and convenient development language.

PHP is a new language

One of the reasons why PHP is so popular is that it is a new language and people can write PHP applications without any programming basics. Most app providers provide PHP development programs to you, and the activation fee for these programs is only a small amount per month. You can write PHP programs in any text editor, so you do not need high-performance machines or expensive IDE. The PHP.net development website has all the development documents and instances you need, so you do not have to study hard at school, or sign a user agreement with the developer website. For new programmers, all these are the reasons that make PHP attractive.

PHP has avoided some problems

Most of the excellent programmers I know have a certain level of PHP, and those bad programmers have also learned some PHP. But for excellent programmers, PHP is neither the first language in their field nor their development direction. Most of the poor programmers I know only know the language PHP, and they are not proficient in PHP. Therefore, for good programmers, learning and using PHP is just a temporary demand. For poor programmers, using PHP is a permanent habit.

Popular PHP for secondary reasons

There are many reasons for the popularity of PHP: free, open source, easy to use, and so on. Most application providers provide available PHP Development kits, and many programs have already preset PHP. The biggest features of PHP itself, such as execution speed, resource requirements, and development speed, are not much different from those of many other languages. PHP is only popular for secondary reasons.

PHP expired

PHP originated from the outdated web development library in Perl. It has developed and expanded, and is even outdated, as have projects written in PHP. If most PHP projects previously do the simplest thing, such as connecting to the registry list, visitor computing, and some templates, the processing capabilities of these PHP projects are now under user management, financial Operations, high practicability, and balanced configuration have reached the bottleneck.

Conflict

Now let's talk about the dilemma faced by PHP. PHP applications are becoming more and more complex, but PHP cannot attract and retain excellent programmers because it is not beautiful enough. What are the results? More and more applications are written by low-level developers. As a result, PHP is increasingly difficult to find qualified developers. (Your own PHP projects become more and more complex .)

Question?

How can we attract excellent developers to develop PHP? The biggest reason is that qualified developers cannot be found. This problem also plagued other development languages. Can other development languages solve this problem? Is there a solution to this problem?

Outlet

Like others, I have no solution. However, I am optimistic about service application providers, such as Amazon and Google. They may be out of date in a few months or even a few years, but then more service providers will join (Yahoo, Microsoft, or IBM ?) .

I think this is the way to provide application services. First, they should classify programmers into two categories. The first type is novice programmers who do not know and have little resources to allocate. They need to use services, databases, function libraries and programming interfaces provided by service providers. (Of course, good programmers can also use this, but they have other options, unlike New beginners .) The provided Application Service should easily solve what they do not know and can help them at any time. Especially for PHP, this has been done for several years. Most Outstanding programmers participate in core projects and special development. They need more knowledge and experience.