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Laravel or Symfony? Does it really matter? Had an interesting reaction to a recent Senior PHP Developer role I've been recruiting for the last week. Fully Remote? Check. Good Salary & Benefits package? Check. Greenfield projects in a sector people care about? Check! However I've had a number of PHP Developers say to me today they're not interested as the business purely because they as they would be using Symfony as opposed to Laravel. I get it, Laravel is the more widely used framework. But they're transferable skills, surely what really pique an engineers interest is the technical challenge of the projects and the compensation/work-life balance on hand. Any thoughts on why switching to Symfony is a concern?
Craig Woodland
3mo
For me the more the merrier. I love picking up other frameworks and technologies as it gives you a broader sense of alternative ways to get things done. In fact I would go so far as to say I would prioritise a role which has something new vs one that is an exact experience match for this reason
Chris Riley
3mo
The two frameworks are quite different conceptually. Laravel is very much "batteries included" it has a library or package or service for doing most everything you might need. This works great if your needs align with the package authors needs, but often as soon as you need to go away from the Laravel way of doing things, you run into trouble. The main upside of Laravel is that someone who has a few years experience in using the available tools can build stuff quickly. Symfony on the other hand provides components, but you often need to write the glue code to stitch them together yourself. This gives a lot more flexibility, but means that most symfony projects would have a learning curve even if you were familiar with the framework. Some people prefer to stay in their comfort zone with the framework that they usually use, either the one which they can always grab an off the shelf component to do something with or the one which they can quickly assemble a solution from a set of components. Personally, I prefer the Symfony/Laminas way of doing things, but it doesn't matter much to me as most of the time I'll structure applications such that there is very little day to day interaction with the framework you're using.
Experienced lead PHP engineer and startup ed-tech Head of Development
3moA framework like Laravel, Symfony or any of the others out there is a learning curve that takes time to gain expertise in. I have seen (and worked on) codebases in Laravel written by engineers who had come from different frameworks that were sub-optimal in many ways because the original author had not had sufficient time to learn the nuances of that framework. Good framework knowledge/mastery takes a long time to develop, and effort to maintain. Having spent a number of years growing my Laravel knowledge, working with symfony would be 'going back to square one'. Undoubtably some engineers would be happy to start over with a new framework, in the same way that they may be happy to switch from PHP to e.g. Python or Go. But others would rather continue to work with the skills they have honed over a time period. Learning a framework well is an investment that many engineers would prefer to continue to reap the rewards of.