PHP "junior" vs "senior" etc entry/medium level jobs

[Agony]

Looking at the job ads gets quite confusing.

You often see things like:

Experience with PHP, mysql, jquery

 

But experience is a quite wide term - even if they add years.

1 year of experience for one might be 1 week worth of learning or other.

 

So it makes me wonder - what is actually expected when you go to work as PHP developer.

 

Iv held back - being unsure if id be able to currently handle te workload or not ( sure trying wont hurt usually - but it does if u need to move/rent an apartment just to work - in which case u may be stuck with a contract and no money).

The job ads are more then often full of " technical" details written by someone in charge of recruiting - but knows nothing of the php itself.

Here is an example:

 

 

Requirements

• Goog knowledge and skills in PHP, MySQL
• Understanding in web services (i.e. XML, SOAP, JSON)
• Documentation skills
• Education in IT and working experience as a software developer
• Ready to take the initiative and ask questions, good interpersonal skills
• Good analytical and conceptual skills
• Sense of punctuality, correctness and responsibility

But based of that - no clue what the "goog" knowledge expects me to actually do.Anyone whos actually part of recruiting people - or applied to jobs with diff requirements could elaborate.

What do they usually/commonly expect you to be able to do within the first days/weeks/months?Net is full of " oh u just need to be able to write simple code to being able to build full featured forums from scratch"

[justsomeguy]

1 year of experience for one might be 1 week worth of learning or other.

1 year of experience doesn't mean you tried learning it for a week, it means you've worked in a job that used it for 1 year. When they say "experience", they mean "professional experience", even if you weren't working for an actual company (maybe just doing hobby jobs or jobs for friends).

So it makes me wonder - what is actually expected when you go to work as PHP developer.

When we hire PHP developers we expect them to be able to start programming immediately without needing to be taught any PHP. We give them a job, they do it. That does not mean that they should not ask questions if they need help though. But their first day on the job is not going to be me teaching them PHP. New developers also come on with a probation period of a few months. After that period we review their work and decide whether to keep them or not.

What do they usually/commonly expect you to be able to do within the first days/weeks/months?

It depends what the position is. A senior developer, for example, would be expected to come on the job with enough knowledge to be able to teach other developers working there. An intern would be expected to need a lot of training and come with little to no experience.If you don't have any professional experience then you need to start as an intern or other entry-level position and work your way up from there. That's how you get experience for better jobs.It should also go without saying that a college degree in a field like computer science goes a long way. If a programmer came to be hired and they were self-taught, I would give them problems and sit there and watch them write code to make sure they know what they're doing.

[Agony]

The expect to start programming when u go to work as a developer is understandable - but what often is left out is the difficulty of the work itself.

For example if you would hire an entry/junior level developer - Would it include just the basics ( loops, if/else, arrays, basic database use, variables, operators and such) or would it also reach the realm of custom built classes, functions, sessions, cashing, file handling databases, ajax, js and such?

[justsomeguy]

what often is left out is the difficulty of the work itself.

When we advertise for a job we don't talk about how difficult the job is, we talk about the skills we need people to have. When they come in for an interview then it's up to us to figure out if their skills are at the right level for the job. That's also what the probation period is for.

would it also reach the realm of custom built classes, functions, sessions, cashing, file handling databases, ajax, js and such?

I consider those basics also. Programming is not about knowing the syntax of control structures or knowing about things like arrays and objects, it's about being able to design and implement a solution to a problem in the most efficient way you can. Some of the things that separate the good programmers from the bad programmers are knowledge about things like different design patterns, how to calculate the complexity of an algorithm, how to use indexes, foreign keys, and stored procedures to design an efficient database schema, etc. Computer science skills, not simply things that you learn in a tutorial. All of the things that you listed are the things I would expect any entry-level programmer to know, a senior-level programmer needs to know the theory and practical use of the kinds of things that you would learn in a college-level computer science program, and they would need several years of experience working with those things in order to be considered senior. A computer science graduate with no work experience is an entry-level programmer. I don't have any room here for someone who wouldn't be able to create their own classes (with inheritance and everything), or doesn't know how ajax works, or doesn't understand sessions or Javascript. All of those things are fundamental to what we do, they get used every day in every project, and I don't have time to teach people those things. I get paid too much money to teach a beginner how ajax works, or how to use a database. I need to spend my time on things that make money for the company. We have people working here writing Javascript and ajax code who are not even considered to be programmers. They need our help periodically to finish up their projects, but they'll come to me with a lot of code already written that either has bugs they can't figure out or is missing features that they need me to add. Their job titles have nothing to do with programming, those are just additional skills they are expected to have. The actual programmers have a skill set that is far deeper than what the other guys have.