It's bad news for anyone looking for good developers (I know this first hand, I'm looking), but good news for those that are actually good developers.

I've been developing PHP for close to ten years, and in the four or five times I've moved jobs in that time (after getting bored, or pissed off), it's generally been pretty trivial to get another one - indeed, I've had at least one instance where I actually had a choice of which job to take.

This time last year, I went home from one job on a Friday evening, posted my CV and by Monday afternoon was talking about interviews. I was literally offered a job by the end of that week.

I could say here about how to get yourself into the top 10%-20% of developers that can get hired pretty much on sight like that - but it would be redundant - if someone is reading blogs like this (I saw it via phpdeveloper.org and planetPHP/Mysql), and are interested in becoming a better developer - then you are already in the 20%.

In the meantime, if you are in the UK within day-trip range of London, then find me, and prove it, if you want a fun gig on a dating website :-).

AlisterB

I'm a LAMP expert and I'm earning $12K a month out of my house. I place a cheap ad and get 10 new client requests in my inbox the next morning. So, the fact that the market is flooded with poor talent is not a problem for me -- clients seem to be smart enough and pay for the better talent. I also build up PHP colleagues and pass work to them when I have more client requests than I can handle. That way, I never tell a client no, but pass them to a qualified LAMP expert and may potentially collaborate with that expert or have the potential client come back to me simply because of how nice I was. Likewise, the colleagues also do the same with me.

Then, and this is something I'm moving into -- if you think of the other site projects I get up on my own, and the Affiliate Marketing and SEO work that I do, you start to realize how I can go way beyond $12K. In fact, one of my mentors on the Internet has left PHP entirely and is doing AM/SEO work full-time and has many projects giving him cash in auto-pilot while he surfs at the beach.

As 99% of all professors would get a heart attack if you tell them how php handels memory leaks, unfortunatly 80% of the so called "PHP developer" would not even have a clue what a "memory leak" (or a garbage collector or a reference or a "zval" or whatever) is.

So as longer as I'm now working with PHP guys I think hiring PHP guys is probably not a so good idea. Probably it's better to take guys which really have a clue about computer science, know a bit about scripting and are not allready Java-Enterprise-contaminated. Tell them about share-nothing-architecture and teach them some PHP and you got your perfect employee within a month.

And the other thing: I really don't think it's the job of the university to learn people programming in language X. Students should be able to learn languages after university by themself. But they have to teach concepts and share-nothing-architecture is realy missed there too often.