Hi guys,
I know these kinds of questions come up a lot, but I wanted to see if we can do it again and make it relevant for today while also considering locale.
So, my question stems from a simple fact: I’ve been working with PHP for about 10 years now. I’m at what I suppose you would call Lead Developer status, where I not only develop but also manage a team, defining coding standards etc. I consider myself to be somewhere around the expert level (not meaning to try to blow my own trumpet) and don’t feel that there’s much more that I can do professionally with PHP itself. By that I mean that without leaving development, my career as a PHP developer has somewhat flat-lined now. Once you’ve gone junior->senior->lead there isn’t really anywhere else to go within PHP development itself, so you need to broaden your horizons, so to speak, or stick with what you know. I choose the latter. I’m technically more advanced with MySQL than PHP, by the way.
That brings me to my question: Where would you go next? I’m looking at Python and Ruby at the moment. The problem with both is that there aren’t a lot of jobs local to me. There are some Python jobs locally, but not a lot, and Ruby jobs all require moving to London by the looks of it, which I’m not so keen on as I have a wife and son who wouldn’t want to move. So what would you do, or even better, what DID you do, being in a similar position? And since we know that demand for certain technologies differs around the globe, where are you based?
Looking for any subjective opinion, all are valid
Thanks