Emran Hasan has a recommendation for those looking to hire on a "senior PHP developer" - beware.

With the rise of PHP developer as career, many are trying to get their share in the pie. Lately I've met a number of developers who have worked for more than one/two years in developing PHP applications in various companies and they consider themselves as "senior" developers.

Key things to keep an eye out for are the "more talk, less code" they tend to do and the lack of dedication to the tasks at hand. These bad developers then follow up with the typical blame to the junior developers, noting that it was them being difficult that caused all of the "real" problems.

On his blog today, Marc Gear asks if developing PHP makes for a solid job prospect for the future:

Good developers who know and want to work in PHP are hard to come by. Consider that perhaps PHP is so popular because it does some jobs really well. [...] To me, [Terry's quote] says that PHP is a pretty good scripting language to be getting stuck into, that its something that you should be using if you want to develop web applications that are used by hundreds of thousands of users across the world.

He points out some developers that are almost ashamed for knowing PHP, thinking that it's a "low level" sort of language that doesn't really count in a world of Javas and .NETs. Too bad they're apparently oblivious to the high quality, enterprise level applications that are developed with it and use it every day. Shame to be missing out on that because of some silly personal opinions...