Think about it, if two or more applicants have experience, but one also has experience in the exact technology already used at the place, that person is ahead in the game.
I frankly would keep quiet about the personal situation, I think everybody understands if you do. He's not looking for charity because he's homeless, he wants a job because he's a professional developer.
The idea that you should learn modern JS and then react to apply for react jobs with no real world experience is a bad one for someone with work history in 2 languages that are in the top 10.. Particularly if they are in a rather desperate situation.
"I have extensive front end experience with Javascript as well."
"No one is really looking for a PHP developer right now. And all the front end jobs want React/Redux experience or Angular."
So, not learning React doesn't seem like a good call unless he wants to stay in the backend. No matter what he will be learning now, he will not have "real world experience" with it. All he can do between jobs is learn. What's your advice exactly? What does "looking at how Python has progressed" even mean?
Take an existing project you wrote in python and modernize it for newer style, maybe it was in legacy 2.X for compatibility with something and needs to be updated. Maybe convert to a python framework that is popular now (there's not so much churn in python so a past framework might just be updated.)
I'm sorry that isn't as dramatic as taking some knowledge of past JavaScript, learning additions that introduce a different paradigm and then an entire new style of development complete with transpiling and maybe typescript.. and then trying to keep it running with churn in the whole bunch of libraries and tools that are in that bizarre front end process.. While not seeming to have any previous experience with compiled languages and related development processes.
Taking a past project and modernizing it allows you to mix discussion of real world experience with your understanding of new things. Where things are just updates you blur perception and significance of the age of your real world experiences.
But switching completely to patterns, code and development processes you have never used before even by analogy is taking that to the most tenuous extreme..
Who knows maybe the OP's past JS experience was in SPAs in a functional style using node tools and an IDE and react is almost reasonable.. But that seems unlikely if python and php were the first languages the OP thinks of.
It makes more sense to milk and refresh past connections to Python to find a new subfield than to try to stay in web development by switching to JS (if it was your 3rd language from 3 years ago) to move from Backend to frontend in the months right before almost every language will get an opportunity on the frontend..
This is not true. I think you'll find a lot of new projects being written in PHP 7.2 and/or using some newer framework, like Laravel.
There is nothing wrong with getting PHP work. PHP is not going away anytime soon, and the language has improved a lot since 5.6.
For a past python developer, trying out something like Django a bit with converting a past project would be less work than react for a js developer and probably a good refresher.
But, if Facebook actually hires react engineers everywhere and just doesn't like their own job platform, then they probably hire php engineers everywhere as php is the platform they are the most famous for sinking money into modernizing.. So again, I'm left to wonder why anyone who already knows php would be told to learn react before looking for a job.
It's a lot like always being told to learn Ruby on Rails a few years back even if you knew nothing at all about ruby. I wonder where all those ruby illiterate RoR engineers ended up.
Granted, I don't know your market, but if it's outside the typical 5-10 cities, that might be the problem.
Ok, so let's assume Facebook is hiring today and for the last 5 years in 10 job markets.
Damn hard to find a company actually using it in many markets for most of that time.
The unpopularity of PHP actually means there are more PHP jobs emerging. Nobody wants to swap out of a functional old system, but the younger folk are going to go after new, sexy, technologies.
In 2007/2008, I'd been doing PHP for 11ish years; started in early 96 with PHP/FI, with vb & notes in the early 90s before that. I kept doing some PHP, but moved primarily to spring/java (via grails). enjoyable, learned a lot, but it always felt clunky and convoluted (I never became as proficient as I wanted in that stack). After several years, I 'came back' to the PHP world. A lot of the early warts/problems were still there, but you could avoid them more or less entirely if you chose to build with the new crop of composer packages and psr-compatible frameworks.
The speed of PHP7+ is comparatively amazing (which, arguably, shows how 'slow' it was before!). PHP 5.6 (2014) was roughly twice as fast as PHP 5.3 (2009). PHP 7.2 (2017) is roughly 2-3x faster than PHP 5.6. In the 8+ years I 'left' PHP (was still using it, just not as primary day to day), the performance doubled, then doubled again. Still not as fast as 'pure' java/c/whatever, but incredible improvements all the same. Given that the majority of my dev work involves a lot of 'line of business' stuff with a SQL database as a central piece, db queries are almost always the biggest performance issue, the relative speed of PHP vs other stacks was even less of an issue for my real world scenarios.
Upcoming experimental JIT stuff looks to make an even bigger improvement in some areas.
Some comparisons were from memory, some from https://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/493-php-performance-evo...
This is true in most settings, from office jobs to the service industry.
Always good to remind yourself that usually professional respect comes from your salary, not the other way around.
I share office space with a company that does SME consulting work and they do heaps of Magento, Wordpress and the like. Everyone's getting paid and nobody is complaining.
Look for more boring jobs that require web development skills, unless you're really stuck on the title.
You know PHP. I did too, once. I made the mistake of taking on a Magento project a decade ago, suffered through it, and I still get hounded by recruiters desperate for PHP developers who know Magento. That fucking platform still powers 99% of the entire e-commerce space; version 2 was released recently and by many accounts it's even worse than v1, which means people who made the mistake of using it are going to need support for it. The demand for PHP developers is still very much there.
You know Python. You can get jobs knowing just that. There are lots of relaxed junior-level *-analyst positions in many domains requiring nothing more than scripting skills and a brain, which you clearly have. I see job postings all the time looking for Django devs. Lots of businesses need reporting-type stuff done, business analytics, ETL, that sort of stuff. Shady businesses always want web scrapers written.
With 10+ years in web development, you might also want to take a shot at jobs involving web application security-- either securing or breaking it.
Just to put it in perspective-- my job title has nothing to do with web development, yet it is an incidentally significant portion of what I do. Best job of my life, and I never would have found it looking for "web developer" jobs, since that's not what they thought they needed when they hired me.
Crawl LinkedIn, not Craigslist. All you'll get from Craigslist are couches, crabs, and people who want you to build out scalable PCI-compliant e-commerce solutions with a full complement of product photography for their hobby business for $500, payable upon delivery. And when they sense your desperation, they'll withhold even that until you go away.
Best of luck to you.