PHP suffers from a contempt of the familiar. Lots of programmers of a certain age started off writing PHP poorly before they knew how to properly do their craft (in PHP or otherwise). When you mention PHP, the immediate association for some people is invariably going to be "that really bad PHP 3.5 site I made that one time." Leaving aside any positive or negative points to be made about the language itself, you're dealing with that.
On the other hand, if you work in a generally well regarded but less used language like OCaml IMO you're much more likely to trigger a "huh, I've been meaning to play around with that," or maybe a "gee, if you could pick up an ML while interning you must be pretty adaptable." The relative obscurity might even work in your favor if the person interviewing you is familiar with The Blub Paradox[0] and suspects OCaml might be higher up the language power continuum than the languages they know and you get cred for being a language wonk.
Honestly, people who are looking for PHP programmers are not looking for me. It's not going to be a fulfilling experience for me, and I'm not going to be a great fit for their company culture.
(I'm in a "microservices architecture" (their word, not mine; I find it cringey, but eh) org where we're expected to deliver features as REST APIs, programming language be damned.)
Certainly, but I'd guess that most of the people who worked at Jane Street are looking to work at places that also don't use PHP. Either that, or they're looking at jobs with hiring managers intelligent enough to realize that they can pick up a new language on the job.
I think this only applies where people have even heard of OCaml, Lisp, Paul Graham...etc. Most people will just think you're the crazy person off in left-field and not respect you for looking outside the box. Of course your mileage will vary. I think you have to remember that the average dev just thinks of software as a job, while someone on HN gets into the theory and philosophy of coding.
Not sure why the downvotes. There are plenty of sites depending on PHP that ensure a steady need for PHP developers. It may not be the highest paying jobs and it may not be located in the valley, but that's still a large market.
Yeah, even at the Amazon tier level nobody is looking for jobs by looking at language expertise...they're looking at algorithms and system design ability. They probably dont' care about what languages you already know.
