What’s the PHP contracting marketing like at the moment?

I’m nearly at the end of a reasonably lengthy PHP contract in the Gloucestershire, UK area – nearly a year and a half. When I exit I’ll be at a few months off the start of a new financial year, and we have IR35 (tax) changes plus Brexit impact looming on the horizon. I am hoping that there will still be a vibrant market despite these challenges.

However a few colleagues are rapidly transitioning to Node or FE JavaScript, possibly because this seems to command better day rates, but also because they’re worried that PHP is dying off, or that most shops that use PHP are (unfortunately) the ones that do awful software engineering.

I do plan to broaden my skills into JS, with an emphasis on the backend, but I would be heartened to hear that PHP is buoyant despite the changing industry (and despite the UK-specific challenges). For folks that are in the UK, what are you seeing? I think there will always be good PHP work in London, but I am loathe to travel that far (from Birmingham).

So as to broaden the discussion for everyone, contracting folks who are not in the UK are welcome to share their thoughts on PHP contracts in their own countries. Do you see people using PHP as often having poor SE practices due to the low technical barriers to entry? Are you seeing terrible WordPress and Joomla sites with no tests or release pipelines? Do you try to diversify into other languages?

Edit: of course the title should be “What’s the PHP contracting market like at the moment?”. Asleep!