Why are PHP programmers paid less than RoR

It just baffles me alot to discover that PHP programmers are pay less than their Ruby On Rails mates. Why fdoes it happen like that? and does it mean that RoR is better than PHP

Because of Supply and Demand. There is a demand for PHP and RoR developers. There are thousands and thousands of PHP developers of various experience levels. There are not nearly as many RoR developers.

Therefore, you have a huge supply of PHP developers, which lowers the cost you need to pay them for the finite number of openings there are. Since there are typically more jobs than there are RoR developers looking for a job, they get paid more.

No, it doesn’t mean RoR is better than PHP. From a salary/wage aspect, yes, that is true. RoR pays better than PHP, but from a language aspect, you’ll find debates for both sides everywhere you go. One isn’t necessarily better than the other, they just do things differently.

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Another thing is that PHP is a language, ROR is a framework, its not a fair comparison.If you compare the salary for Zend developer, Symfony Developer with ROR developer, the pay will be closer and not very far off.

Forget RoR… Java and .NET is where the top $$$ is. @cpradio is correct, there’s bazillion PHP developers. In my field, using PHP is considered a joke. I am sure PHP is more than capable of writing beautiful application. It’s really the programmer’s skill that brings the quality of the code and not the platform language. So, if you’re really chasing after the money then go for Java or .NET

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.NET is a framework that can run a whole range of different languages (one of which is PHP).

Well PHP and Java are languages, .NET is a framework, the comparison is invalid. Id say its better to say C#?

There are plenty of developers on earth for PHP as compare to other languages.

I agree with other posters that PHP is not a framework but ROR and Dot Net are frameworks but I believe the developers of Symfony/CakePHP/CodeIgniter are also not very highly paid. So the only reason left is above which i mentioned :smile:

When people refer to .NET they are talking about the MS Stack: C#, VB.NET, and F#. But mostly C#.

This is true 100% of the time.

.NET is a stack and so is Java. There are multiple languages that can be run on the JVM and anyone working in the JVM should be expected to be familiar with them, just as they are in .NET.

Java is the main language on the JVM. And C# is MS’s answer to Java and is the main language in .NET. The biggest high level difference is that VB moved go VB.NET and brought years of work with it to .NET, where the JVM started out with Java and other languages came later, so are much less adopted.

It’s also not coincidental that C# and Java are almost identical syntactically. Even if C# has matured quite a bit more over the years.

Java and .NET are not a frameworks like Symfony, Laravel, Rails, or even something like Zend. The comparison betwen them an any other stack, be it Ruby, PHP, Python, or antyhing else, is valid. And the part about being paid the most is true.

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Okay guys, lets not focus on semantics here. Read between the lines. The fact is supply and demand drive the salary of programming positions. Period. It is just just like any other business model out there. Too much supply with little demand, lowers the cost you can sell it for, too much demand and not enough supply means the supplies are sold at a high price.

In this analogy the supplies are the Programmers, and the demand is the Jobs.

PHP has a lot of Programmers, and fewer Jobs to the overwhelming amount of Programmers out there.

Ruby has a smaller set of Programmers (but its growing rapidly) with a growing number of Jobs out there.

Let’s stop worrying about whether the question was posted accurately and focus on what the question is asking (as we’re all smart enough to interpret it properly).

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