Forget the framework, forget the AI assistant. What are PHP developers like these days?<p>Awhile back, we wrote an MVP, a proof of concept, using Wordpress. I dug around some of the plugins and themes we used, and <i>my god</i>, it's still garbage. Things being shipped with huge swaths of code just commented out, spaces & tabs intermixed for indentation, TODOs littering the codebase. Things that were just <i>flat out broken</i>.<p>I used to be a PHP developer, and the habits that I learned probably stunted my professional career by a good decade. And from what I've seen - granted, in a very limited exposure - tells me that <i>most</i> PHP developers still write garbage code. Weirdly, I've even seen examples at work where developers write perfectly cromulent Elixir and Javascript/Typescript, but somehow revert back to the fecal firehose when it comes to writing PHP code.<p>I don't care how good Symfony or Laravel is. I care about what happens when my employer hires someone who can't write good code, and in my experience, the odds of that increase hugely when we talk about PHP.