What's the current situation for php jobs? I'm at uni in the UK, and am really getting into php. A friend of mine is good with asp and wants me to help him learn php, and i'm thinking that asp might be more useful for when I come to get a job, as many commercial companies use asp/microsoft over open source.
How many of you guys work as php-devs, and how many as asp-gurus? How do you find the jobs compare?
In my experience, it seems that most companies will work with ASP with IIS. I think this is because the servers are far easier to set up and the web applications can be integrated with VB more easily.
Obviously it usually depends on the client and what they want and how much they can afford.
I made my job. I was in charge of developing curricula for sales folk (technical stuff, like installing CD jukeboxes and all) and got stuck building a web site to do it, and needed a good scripting language and database, so went to talk to the Unix/Linux gurus where I work and got started on LAPP about 4 or 5 years ago.
We've since cannibalized lots of old NT servers that were becoming a bit long in the tooth. Machines that crashed once a week and lost data every other time were replaced by a single Linux box that does their work in it's spare CPU cycles.
There's still a lot of Windows folks around here, but honestly, the competency is moving to Unix / Linux, and leaving behind the "click and drool" boys on windows. I'd guess there are fewer than 4 or 5 good Windows developer / admin types where I work now, but dozens and dozens of unix types.
i don't work for a company that need in house work, but when i get clients to work for, they tend to run on linux boxes and/or are hosted on linux boxes cuz of cost effectiveness, so what i am getting at, is if you get a job at a web development company, more times that not, you will have to work with linux rather than M$, in my experience anyway
I would like to echo what stolzy said... it depends on if you work for a company who specializes in web hosting, development, etc then yes, php (and LAMP) will be your friend. However, if you become the web development guru in a smaller company that doesn't have anything to do with web hosting, they may be looking for an ASP person because they don't know what they're talking about. Does that make sense? Kind of like the job managers that require knowledge of Dreamweaver without the knowledge of HTML. If they knew what they were talking about, it would be the other way around.
I also believe that the people doing the hiring in non-IT companies may not really know what qualifications are needed to perform a web development position- and may mistakenly take the ASP way out.
My personal advice is... (and remember that advice is worth what you pay for it and this is free 
) if you're not sure what kind of company you want to be working for, or if you want to keep yourself marketable- you may want to focus on one but have some knowledge of the other as a back-up.
hth-
-Elizabeth
And don't forget to thank your favorite deity every day that you weren't born a marketer...
The company that I start work for on Monday (
) are a web design company, and they use ASP. Looks like I'm gonna have fun converting them.