Staying relevant today as a PHP Developer

I have always been a big PHP fan and used it now for near 20 years now.

Being a PHP developer has always had a stigma, like somehow you aren’t a real developer and pretty much sneers from other developers like Java or Python.

This was never an issue for me as there was always plenty of good paying jobs so I didn’t let it bother me too much.

But now I am out of a job in the UK and there is a real lack of jobs in PHP, and the majority that are hiring are offering a poor salary compared to other languages. Which makes no sense, especially with the likes of Node.js which is just JavaScript.

Even now I build microservices on AWS using PHP and Bref, it works great and extremely fast and powerful.

Recruiters even hit me with the “oh PHP” and I can’t get a look in. These PHP jobs that are hiring don’t even respond to me or I get an auto rejection. My previous salary was 120k and now I’m getting turned down for jobs at 40-50k.

What are people’s thoughts? Unfortunately I think it is time to reinvent myself, maybe move to Go, Rust or Python?