When I changed jobs from a Ruby role to a PHP role. A lot of people asked why? They anecdotally tell me that it is often the other way round where developers who specialised in PHP, moves to Ruby instead (Well at least this was the common talk back in 2016).
The main reason to be honest was that I relocated from London to Milton Keynes. In London there is a huge demand of Ruby roles available and they also appear to be prepared to pay top dollar for the developers as well, presumably due to the demand.
However, in Milton Keynes, there were only a handful of companies who were looking for developers who had Ruby experience. Fewer than 5 I’d say. When I relocated, I did apply for those roles but in the event I didn’t get an offer, then I would’ve had to stay at my current role based in London.
I didn’t mind too much, the company took good care of me and I had a great team to work with but my wife and I just had a child (less than a month old), the commute, both in the morning and evening would mean I’ll be out of the house for long periods and so I wouldn’t be able to help her as much as I would’ve liked.
I looked at other developer roles in the area and found that there were a few that stood out for me in terms of opportunity count. C# and PHP roles. Given that I was going to move within a few months I needed to decided between PHP and C#, which to go for and study up fast. PHP being a scripting language and having many similarities to Ruby, that made it an easy choice. I’ve dabbled with C# for a bit, but the learning curve definitely feels steeper and time wasn’t a luxury I could afford at that moment.
Anyway, while I was learning PHP and building a portfolio of projects, I was also applying for opportunities. I’m pretty honest in my CV and mentioned my proficiency with Ruby and JavaScript, but also learning PHP. After speaking with many recruiters, I managed to secure two interviews in the same week, both based in Milton Keynes.
The first one was for a PHP role, on the job spec it mentioned ‘Ruby experience desirable’. Perfect, I might be able to secure this one if I do well enough. They provided a mini test to do at home which was to build this HTML page with CSS to match an screenshot of their own page. At the interview I was asked to create 3 input fields and save the contents to the database. Easy enough.
The second company I interviewed with was a front end role, they asked basic questions and they provided a quick question/answer test to fill in. I remember doing very poorly at this stage but I think I interviewed well.
At the end of all of this, I had gotten offers from both companies and I used this situation to my advantage and negotiated a higher salary. I went with the first company as they were using PHP which I believed will be better for my career moving forward even though the other company offered more money.
So that’s how I ended up moving to a PHP role. The key thing (in my opinion) here was my willingness to adapt to the environment I’m in. Its not too difficult to switch tech-stacks once you have some grounding on the fundamentals, but the deterrent for some people seems to be learning something new or stepping outside your comfort zone. In order to survive in this industry, I believe you have to keep on learning and improving, staying stagnant just because you feel like you have job security can be dire if you’re not prepared. In fact, I was recently made redundant and I managed to solve that situation very quickly because I was prepared. You can read more about that experience here.
In hindsight, I definitely felt I made the right choice choosing that offer over the other, I was lucky to have had the opportunity to work with a really good PHP developer at that company. He taught me a lot and my experience and growth there was pretty huge.
Would I go back to using Ruby again? I don’t know to be honest, I actually really enjoyed Ruby and how elegant it is to work with, I’ve also had the opportunity to work with it in a technical test (which I wrote a blog post about) but the trends are suggesting that it is a dying language, there seems to be fewer companies using it and it doesn’t look to be change its downward course anytime soon.