After years of growth in the PHP space, the market has become more stable with the same organisations dominating the PHP market. During COVID-19, many companies have moved to a complete transformation and it’s more common in PHP than other tech that companies are engaging with remote candidates. The market has moved significantly from the traditional LAMP stack to PHP Developers who have extensive knowledge of modern MVC Frameworks. In Malta, the most frequently used PHP MVC frameworks are Laravel and Lumen. Symfony is still a very popular framework that is used by many teams in the market.
PHP Developers with proven commercial experience in NoSQL databases are in demand and the majority of technical managers require PHP Engineers to have a TDD mindset and familiarity with PHP testing tools.
After a period of high demand and stricter requirements, which led to an increase in salaries for the PHP developers, we now see that salaries have remained stable for the past year. When the PHP market picked up a couple of years ago, many PHP developers based in Malta didn’t have the required exposure to the modern tech around PHP and numerous organisations had to relocate experienced PHP Engineers from abroad which naturally led to an increase in salaries.
However, now PHP Developers stay up-to-date with the latest tech trends and skillsets in this area causing salaries to stabilise. In the current market, companies who are still executing their hiring process are seeking candidates with strong skills in Design Patterns but also strong experience in TDD and modern testing tools.
Most companies have compensations prepared to secure these types of candidates. These benefits can range from health and insurance to various company allowances and flexible working hours.