title: Dear employers, stop asking about PHP frameworks
author: 寮
date: 2022-07-14 07:00:00
tags:technology,business,webdev
threadid: ALSkoJnMuaErfre5eC
----
As a freelancer, job interviews are extremely common to me, I'm having job interviews multiple times a month (because I typically get projects done between 1 day and 1 week) which I have to get through before being allowed to [took ther jurbs](http://jewtube.i2p/watch?v=N-kgb1QtSnU).\
Every time I apply for a PHP project to work on, immediately the first question is "Which frameworks do you use?", implying that it's literally impossible to make shit in PHP without a framework.\
But never do they ask any technical questions to test my knowledge of PHP and/or any of these frameworks.

So once I realized that, I switched from "I don't use any frameworks, because I'm much more productive without those" (my honest answer) to "I currently use Laravel and CakePHP, I used to use Zend Framework and Symphony in the past, but I get my job done in Laravel and CakePHP much quicker" (a big fat lie, and sometimes I have to change the position of these frameworks depending on what the job posting is asking for).\
The reason is, HR doesn't give a fuck about how well you can do your job, they only care about whether your thoughts and CV match with what they want to hear or not.\
Once I get through the interview process, I just use vanilla PHP anyway, and only reveal to them that I didn't use a framework after the fact.\
And very often they not only get positively surprised by how easy it is to deploy the final product, how much more scalable it is than older projects done in frameworks, and how quickly I made stuff, they're very happy to call me up for more projects in the near future too.

So yea, stop asking developers about frameworks, I seriously want to answer honestly and not resort to bullshit just to be able to put food on the table!
