Yeah, Giles seems kind of confused about how the PHP ecosystem works. Those "commodity" PHP programmers who flood the market with insanely low bids? As a PHP programmer, they are not your problem. They are your client's problem, one that you can charge money to solve. Because it's really hard for a client to find good developer talent among that huge crowd. Lord knows it can't be done by screening resumes for keywords. So once you (the aspiring PHP programmer) have done a bit of work and a bit of networking, and a handful of established PHP folks have met you and filed your name in their contact lists under good PHP talent (a club that is really not that hard to join) you're likely to start getting leads. Leads who are willing to pay your price just to avoid having to screen another 5,000 resumes.

Meanwhile, that army of "commodity" programmers will be out there, energetically growing the market for your services by bringing lots and lots of new PHP-powered sites online. Every blogger who installs Wordpress, and every school and church and magazine and music label that goes online with a basic Drupal site, is a potential future customer.

Of course, just because PHP work pays decently and is easy to find doesn't mean you'll enjoy it. There's a lot of pain involved in working with PHP, particularly other people's PHP. (I ameliorate the pain somewhat by sticking strictly to Drupal, which has higher coding standards and a better defined, more modular structure than the average PHP newbie's code.) But the work is certainly out there.