The article confirms Karwin's view that there is still more demand for .NET developers, but the main observation is that while demand for PHP jobs has dropped 19% in the past 12 months, .NET demand has dropped 49%.

I've already commented on how PHP would be better able to withstand the economic slowdown in my 2008 lookback post, and it's good to see that the CV Screen article is able to confirm this with actual numbers.

The article quotes CV Screen's Director, Matthew Iveson: "There is still significantly more demand for .NET skills but over the last 12 months we have seen a shift towards Open Source technologies."

Iveson mentions the reason for this shift: "One of the main reasons for this shift is the significant associated costs of .NET compared to PHP. This cost differential is also highlighted by CV Screen's IT Salary Survey which shows that on average a PHP developer in the UK earns £ 29,577, compared to £ 34,881 for a .NET developer".

While I agree that the cost of deploying PHP applications is lower, I think this is more due to PHP's effectiveness as a language itself than the actual cost of salaries. Good PHP developers and good .NET developers have similar salaries, but since PHP is so easy to learn and get access to, there are more developers at the lower end of the spectrum, taking the average down. Also, .NET is typically used by larger organisations, taking the average up. (At Ibuildings the average salary for a PHP developer is higher than the salaries mentioned in CV Screen's press release, but since we employ a relatively large amount of senior developers, it is logical that we see different numbers than CV Screen. This however strengthens my point that the .NET and PHP salaries themselves aren't much different; it is possible to make an equally decent living from PHP.)

The article ends with the following quote from Iveson: "We are noticing that more and more companies are looking at redeveloping and optimising their website and the cheapest way of doing this is with PHP. We would anticipate that given that .NET is typically used by larger organisations who are holding off on new projects, that PHP will continue to gain market share."

With that conclusion, I wholeheartedly agree. If you see similar or different trends in other countries, I'd like to invite you to post a comment below.