From PHP to Go or Front-end? The suggestions and confusions of reality from experienced people

The career development difficulties and choices of PHP engineers

Current situation and troubles

Recently I found that colleagues in other positions in the company (such as Android and Embedded C) generally paid more than PHP and front-end engineers, even if they were onboarding later. After communicating with the leader, the response was that "PHP salary is indeed low." This made me reflect on my career development. Our PHP team undertakes most of the company's business, has a large workload, and often works overtime. It is not only responsible for back-end development, but also manages servers, and even takes into account some front-end and mini-program development. However, salary is not proportional to workload.

Go: The temptation and potential risks of high salary

A colleague who changed his career in Go suggested that I also learn Go, and said that the salary and benefits of Go are better than PHP. Although I tried to learn Go before, I gave up because of the grammar differences and the fewer Go positions at the time and turned to Swoole. Now that the demand for Go language market has increased, the salary level has also increased. With the successful cases of my colleagues, I have begun to seriously consider turning to Go. However, I was still hesitant. On the one hand, I was reluctant to give up the existing PHP technology stack, and on the other hand, I was also worried about the maturity of the Go language ecosystem. In addition, the situation of Go language engineers in the company also made me feel confused.

Front-end: Low motivation and high learning costs

The willingness to switch to the front end is not strong. First of all, the front-end salary is not much different from PHP; secondly, I personally feel that from the back-end to the front-end has been "downgraded" in the technology stack. I have three years of front-end experience and am familiar with Vue.js (as well as HTML, CSS and JS), but I just stay at the level of using the Element UI to build pages and not deeply learn front-end frameworks and technologies. If I switch to the front-end, I need to put in more energy to learn in depth to be competent for higher-level front-end development.

Suggestions from people who have experienced it: choose carefully and do what you can

I personally recommend that you choose to move to other backend languages ​​rather than frontend. Because the learning cost of the front-end is very high, and your years of back-end experience can effectively reduce the learning cost of turning to other back-end languages.

It is recommended that you first investigate the demand trends of local enterprises for back-end languages, such as Java, and choose a language with a large market demand and good development prospects for learning and transformation.

The current situation and future of PHP

It is undeniable that PHP is not a pure backend language. Although it was very popular in the early days (around 2014), PHP's market position declined after the prevalence of front-end and back-end separation architectures. This is related to PHP's original design goal (Personal Home Page), which focuses more on simplifying web development.

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