[pantelisk]

> dev recruitment is hard.

No way. It is pretty easy. To be fair it is harder in the Bay Area than let's say Europe, but it is still a non-issue. Also, the language is extremely easy to pick up, everyone is able to understand the code. This week for example I 've had an ios dev that is using Obj-C/Swift just dig into the code themselves to get clarity on an endpoint's execution.

> dev retention is hard.

Never really had an issue there.

> hard to find people that write clean, modern, performant PHP

This also has not been a problem in the past few years. For context, I 've had multiple devs excited and pushing to start using new PHP8 features, already (and I had to be the boring one and ask to wait for hotfixes, a version .1 or .2 and see how stable and secure 8.x is first).

> It does not enjoy the best reputation as a language.

This is true. I 've met people who refuse to even look at PHP code, even though they are paid to do so (they might even refuse at the detriment of their peers). I 've never seen a "this is beneath me" attitude with any other tool or language before. (except perhaps the hate SQL databases got in 2015-2016) So yeah, the hate runs deep.

[29athrowaway]

I had PHP listed among my Linkedin skills and never once in over 10 years a recruiter contacted me on Linkedin asking me to apply for a PHP job.

I have been contacted for every single of my other skills, even F# which is one of the most rarely used languages ever.