One possible remedy that I didn’t see discussed — start an Internet business and grow it until it makes you money.<p>Internet businesses are hard (because regular entrepreneurship is hard), but if you have a laptop and ~$12 yearly for a domain you can do it (I mean, really — use a free DDNS service and point to your laptop and keep it always on, use oracles free tier, etc). It wont be easy but its barrier-free and you can do it while you do the driving gig.<p>Honestly I think PHP is the problem (I just don't think its well regarded by the majority of devs anymore), but rather than learn TS or something else you can lean into this a try to break into the Wordpress plugin ecosystem. It won’t be easy, and success is far from guaranteed but nothing is stopping you. One of the blessings of our profession is how frictionless it is to build.<p>If you need server space or a k8s cluster to deploy to I’m willing personally to help.