How to Find and Hire the Best PHP Developers in 2021

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Finding the best developers in today’s market is pretty much mission impossible. The tech market is highly competitive and therefore, the best talents already have great jobs.

A talented PHP developer is hard to find because of the low interest for new developers to learn this programming language. Many of them think that this is a dying framework.

This blog will answer your question about whether is a waste of time to invest in learning PHP and it will help you find the best PHP developers in the tech market.

What PHP developer stands for?

The meaning of a PHP developer is a software programmer who is specialized in developing, testing, and implement software applications using PHP as a programming language.

PHP’s best use is for developing back-end web applications, so we can say that PHP developers are in a way, web developers.

PHP is a server-side language. This suggests PHP engineers aren’t front-end trained professionals and they work best in the background. They make all the applications dynamic so that the page is not just with static content.

What is a must for a PHP developer?

The five things that a PHP developer must know:

  • He should know the language inside out, not just the essentials.
  • He should know the basics of Front-end web development (HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery).
  • An absolute must is to know how to work with databases (SQL).
  • At least one PHP testing framework (PHP Unit, Codeception, PHP Spec).
  • One of the most used PHP frameworks (Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter).

Is PHP worth your time?

The number of developers that are using PHP is showing that this programming language is not dying. Directly or indirectly around 80% of all websites on the internet whose server-side language is known to the public. Some of the most popular websites that are using PHP are Facebook, Microsoft, WordPress, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Zoom, Pinterest, and Tumblr.

The most important thing for PHP is that in the last couple of years it doesn’t show signs of decline.  Although some developers are leaning towards newer JS frameworks like Node.js and React. With these frameworks you can develop the front and the back of the application, so you only need one programming language to develop a full web application.

The best places to find a PHP developer.

These are the places where you can search for great PHP developers.

  1. Specialised IT job boards such as Unicorn.io, Careers.sh, WhoIsHiring
  2. CodinGame Sourcing
  3. Freelance platforms
  4. PHP communities for developers (Reddit, Laracasts, Laravel.io, Cloudways)
  5. Generic programming websites (StackOverflow).
  6. Code repositories (GitHub).
  7. Social media (Linkedin).

Final thoughts

Great PHP developers are extremely hard to find. Their numbers are decreasing and this is due to the common thought that PHP is a waste of time and a dying programming language. Yet the same number of websites are using PHP today as they did four years ago. With that said there is still a high number of great PHP developers if you know where to look.