[nikdaheratik]

Well I've been gainfully employed for pretty much my entire career using PHP and I've never had a problem with recruiters. It really depends on the city, the companies in that city, and the overall market in your region.

Big business runs on Java/.NET, but small-midsized businesses run on a variety of different platforms partially based on the history of their IT department and their development needs.

The bottom line is that you can write a good greenfield web application for a midsized business faster, with less overhead, and with fewer headaches using PHP and a good framework than you can with Java or any of those other tools you mentioned. The tradeoff is that they don't integrate as easily with the huge backend software packages and may not scale as well as Java and .NET. Which is why huge businesses don't run with them as much.