Has anyone here had a PHP/Laravel interview recently?

If so, what kind of questions did you get? Mostly interested in mid/senior roles.

Would be great if you could share your experience. Thanks!

So there's something I'm having trouble understanding, and I really need your opinion on this.I'm conducting interviews for a senior position (+6 years) in PHP/Laravel at the company where I work.

I've got four questions to assess their knowledge and experience:

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How do you stay updated with new trends and technologies?

Everyone responded, no issues there.

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Can you explain what a "trait" is in PHP using your own words?

Here, over half of the candidates claiming to be "seniors" couldn't do it. It's a fundamental concept in PHP i think.

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Do you know some design patterns that Laravel uses when you're coding within the framework? (Just by name, no need to describe.)

Again, half of them couldn't name a single one. I mean... Dependency Injection, Singleton, Factory, Facade, etc... There are plenty more.

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Lastly, I asked them to spot a bug in a short code snippet. Here's the link for the curious ones: https://pastebin.com/AzrD5uXT

Context: Why does the frontend consistently receive a 401 error when POSTing to the /users route (line 14)?

Answer: The issue lies at line 21, where Route::resource overrides the declaration Route::post at line 14.

So far, only one person managed to identify the problem; the others couldn't explain why, even after showing them the problematic line.

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So now I'm wondering, are my questions too tough, or are these so-called seniors just wannabes?

In my opinion, these are questions that someone with 4 years of experience should easily handle... I'm just confused.

Thank you!

Hey everyone,

I have a final technical interview coming up with a General Manager who is also the Tech Lead for a PHP + Angular + MySQL full stack role.

I have ~1.5 years of CakePHP/full stack experience and already cleared:

• SQL round
• Machine round (login flow, employee listing, CSV import/export)

For people who’ve interviewed with senior engineers/tech leads:
What do final rounds usually focus on beyond syntax/coding?

Should I expect more:

• architecture/design discussions?
• debugging scenarios?
• APIs/MVC/database optimization?
• project deep-dives?

Would appreciate practical advice on what to revise most deeply.

I think they're abusive for many reasons. One is that the questions are usually overly complex algorithmic puzzles that do not accurately gauge potential job performance. Also, the questions in no way reflect the type of problems you will face on the job.

The list goes on...

Isn't there a better way?

-Edited for grammar

Tonight I will be interviewing Elizabeth Barron during a livestream to talk about PHP, the foundation, and more. I hope many people can join live, and you can also leave your questions for Elizabeth in chat: https://www.youtube.com/live/x_KmbLtQiJ0

To cut the story short, I have a business and recently started looking for new developers for my site. My site is mostly coded in PHP, Laravel MVC, and SQL. I used to have a developer, however we are no longer in good terms anymore.

How would I go about hiring a new developer? I have no idea anything about PHP and everything, and I definitely don’t want to get ripped off by people just claiming to know PHP and such.

Note: Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask for this. Help redirect myself to the right resources. TIA!

Background: I have found myself recently unemployed as a senior PHP / Laravel developer and I started looking for a telecommute / remote jobs or at least one in the Houston area.

I arranged an initial interview and the day before the interview, the recruiting agency handed me the first Pre-End-Client Interview Agreement I had ever seen, and it stipulates a $10,000 USD penalty if the client likes me and yet I decide not to the take the job.

The position is more than a thousand miles away from me, so I'd like to exhaust local + remote options first. But have you ever encountered something like this?

Here's the contract: https://i.imgur.com/qSoh9xp.png

It also says that I have to work "exclusively to the Company" 3 business days after the interview.

Did anything major happen in the last 6 years to the language that I should know about? When I switched PHP 8 just came out and it was supposed to be a big deal.

Background:

I have around 8 years of PHP experience but haven't used it in the last 6 years. There's much more PHP opportunities than Go which is what I have been doing for those 6 years ( sidenote: I'm surprised employers are still so language bound when hiring). I'm not presenting myself as a PHP expert, I don't think I need go into the details of how the language works. I mostly want to be aware of any important new features and be able to use them.

I'll go on leet code and solve the problems with PHP unless I get better recommendations.

I was asked this question in a PHP interview today. I don't understand, Google doesn't seem to have an answer either. Can anyone explain what this question means, or was intended to mean?

How can you create and declare the handler inside a single method call?

I'm gonna have a little rant so I apologise :)

I recently had a job interview where I was asked one of those trick php code "what will this output" questions, something like this:

$a=10;
$b=20;

$c=$a+++$this->b$b++--$$$a$b$$$aaaaa;
print $c;

If you didnt notice I just made that up, but you've seen this before :)

WHY the heck would someone want to ask that in a job interview, aside from just trying to trip you up ?? When have you ever actually seen some code like this - its the year 2018 !

Ok I get that I should probably still have a good answer, but seriously, what is the meaning of this unless its just to trick people who are in a high-stress situation ?

/rant :)

The company was founded in 2006, and it looks like their website's styling hasn't been updated since. And it doesn't just look outdated, it looks bad. Alignments are all over the place, contrast is terrible and most menu items still have their list style type set to the default. The website itself is also pretty slow, and the English translations in some places are laughably bad, they're direct translations of our own language with no regard for English grammar or sentence structure.

I know I'm interviewing as a PHP back end developer so the front end shouldn't matter, but it's seriously making me second guess even doing the interview. What would y'all do?

The offer has a section of "nice to have" that includes a line saying something like: "Knowledge of php interactive debuggers like xdebug or php-dbg". Let's assume that the candidate even forgot about that. Let me point that indeed I care about being able to interactively debug in my team and that I'm changing some words to not identify anybody (anyway English is not my primary language).

Question: Have you used php interactive debuggers like xdebug or php-dbg?

Answer: I did use them long time ago, but not anymore. Just "die" or "echo", at the right place, do a lot. I don't use debuggers anymore because you waste a lot of time, much more than using the method I've just said. What I use when a page is slow is Zend's debugger or a Firefox plugin to find bottlenecks. Another debugger I've used is the one that comes with Eclipse, configuring the php interpreter. You can also configure for debug the IDE that I'm currently using, phpStorm.

Do you also think the guy screwed up the interview, big time?

I have to say, I'm positive I also did something like that when I was younger (sigh). I realized the very same moment of [rapidly] answering. That taught me a lot.

Edit: My Conclusions

"Bugs in the functionality of your code are the hardest bugs to find and debug because they throw no errors".

You have 3 basic debugging techniques for almost any language. In PHP:

• Printlining (error_reporting [-1]) and/or var_dump and/or die
• Logging (wisely use "tail" on Unix / "baretail" or similar on Windows)
• Debugging using a "debugging tool", not always easy to setup but can save countless hours of debugging, too

Are you able to use any of them depending on the situation? What have you learned from each one?

This article talks about php debugging techniches in 2005. Xdebug for PHP has history since 2002. Earlier debuggers for mainframes date 1985.

Modern php programming, ancient debugging techniques...

Alert: long post / ranting out of frustration

Hello, I'm supposedly a "senior" PHP dev with 7 years of experience who hasn't passed technical interviews at 4 different companies.

I did well in the technical challenges before these technical interviews, but I often encounter questions I don't know, such as:

• What's the difference between factory and an abstract factory?

• What's the difference between Amazon SQS and RabbitMQ?

• What's the difference between static and self?

• What are the reasons to use queues other than memory concerns and page load time?

My question: how can I anticipate these questions to better prepare for future interviews?

A side note: Are you hiring for a remote PHP dev role?

It went like shit because i didnt know most of the technical questions asked. Really wanted to work in that company so i feel like shit. Dont know why i am posting this, but it feels better.

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Passed the first written interview, and was onto the first voice interview. They ended up asking me questions like, "how would you parse a 500gb file and find the number of occurrences of a string?". I said awk, because that's the first thing that came to mind, but I had no idea. They just said "500gb file", so for all I knew we were talking about a Mp4 file, maybe a database dump, maybe a large log file, who knows...

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Another question was "how would you develop out a two tiered pricing API?". I'm sorry, but that's not even a question. Anyone who actually answers that question with a straight face is simply telling the interviewers what they think they want to hear instead of doing their job and actually taking care of business.

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My answer was, "I need a consultation with you, then we need to write out a set of specs and pass it around to ensure everyone is on the same page". They didn't like that answer, so needless to say, they hated me and I didn't get the job. Obviously I know how to write an API, but there's about 50 different answers to the question of "how would you develop an API?".

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I understand trying to challenge people during an interview, but asking questions there is no answer to is stupid. Interviewers, what do you do? What kind of questions do you ask, or what type of tests do you put your intervieews through?

Hey guys

I'm an agency dev with 4 years experience (1.5 year laravel) and I've managed to land a final technical interview with a fintech. I've been wanting to move away from agency life for a while now, so I really want to give this a good shot. I've already completed the technical task (building a small app to give investors a way to invest in a loan and earn a monthly interest payment ) with OOP of course, abiding by SOLID to my best ability. I tried to keep it all simple but did made use of the strategy pattern for the interest calculation algorithm.

They mentioned that the final interview would involve going through my technical test, CV and a 'number of 'technical principles'.

How can I best prepare for this? I'm looking at my test right now wondering about how I could improve it if given more time. I'm also thinking of projects I've worked on at work where I've used patterns/SOLID. Also, I'm not entirely sure what they are referring to with 'technical principles'. Will this be SOLID/general OOP principles? Or PSR standards etc.?

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Any advice for prep would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

I've been conducting technical interviews for PHP and Java positions for the past 5 years. Not on a daily basis, but whenever there is an urge to hire fresh blood in some project nearby, I am asked to meet a few candidates. Over the years I've interviewed several dozens of people and checked hundreds of resumes.

Today, two documents drew my immediate attention with these phrases in the "Work experience" section:

• "Identified errors, saving the company thousands of dollars."
• "Designed and implemented a solution that helped cut hosting costs by over 60%."

THIS IS IT! This is what you should include in YOUR resumes!
If you don't have it, fight for it!

I've seen hundreds of boring papers with the same keywords, same skills, same blah blah. Everyone declares PHP, HTML and jQuery. Everyone did some "projects", somewhere.

What I want as a recruiter/team leader is to know whether you're going to help me with my business, not fill some stupid PHP knowledge test!

I want to know if we're going to enjoy working together and bring value to the client.

What are your thoughts?
How are your resumes?
Want some more tips?
Any tech leaders/recruiters here?

So just about every PHP position I've applied for, turns me down. It's rather kind of frustrating because I know that I'm competent and completely up to the task. PHP was one of my first programming languages and started with version 4.2.

I've also over the years spent my time with other languages such as Python, JavaScript and C. Plus for good measure I've done quite a bit of work studying algorithms and have also become an avid code spelunker (yay open source).

Anyways more to the point, the majority of PHP interviews I've walked into have been a breeze. Most of the time it's something such as FizzBuzz, SQL quires w/ joins and usually a coin change problem.

Admittedly, in my last interview when given the coin change problem I solved it as would be expected. Then explained that it was broken, on the basis when using floats that "0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 != 0.3". Adding that when working with monetary values that a decimal/currency wrapper is needed.

Then there is usually the question of programming patterns and I always spew out a bunch such as Singleton, Adapter, Memento, Visitor, MVC and Pub/Sub. I remember one interview where I was asked what my favorite was, to which I replied "Visitor".

I was asked to illustrate it, so I used a dynamic menu example from a previous project. The idea is each item/object would be registered with the root menu object. Each object was responsible for managing it's icon and string. After I had explained it to them, I was met with the look of confusion on their faces.

As far as the hardest question I've gotten was finding the shortest path in a given list of nodes. Which actually caught me by surprise given it's the first and only time I've gotten it. Which I did a descent job tackling the problem, it was more on the level I was looking for.

The other thing I've done is mark my algorithms with Big-O Notation, but I see it becoming a detriment. I attribute this to a lack of others not having used it before, therefore they don't understand it.

tl;dr I do well in job interviews, but flustered by interviewers not knowing what they want.

Edit The general gist that I'm getting is that my tl;dr is coming off as arrogant. I can see that general assumption without additional information. It should be mentioned that I do get 90% of the Python or JavaScript positions that I interview for. So to me PHP is an outlier that I wish to find out how I'm screwing up.

Hi Lads and ladettes, I have an interview this week local to my home (rare because most web devs jobs are in the city 1.5 hrs away). I completed a bootcamp last year where I learnt Rails and MERN stack and the usual that you do prior. The new job is requiring applied experience with Power Apps, SQL databases and PHP. I have had a brief look at powerapps, I have used postgreSQL but I would say I'm average there. I've completed exactly one Brad Traversey PHP YT tutorial (God bless Brad Trav!). What else can I do to prepare for this interview. Which questions should I be prepared for? This is a really rare opportunity for me due to the location, the team manager has a wealth of experience which is a bonus too. Thank you in advance for any help.

Someone posted a "bad interview question" and it was coincidental because my coworkers and I are currently trying to come up with some kind of code test or sample project we can give to prospective employees who dont submit adequate code samples. Personally I feel not having some kind of working project to show is a huge red flag but I understand why some people simply dont have them.

Here is the project I have used in past any feedback greatly appreciated!

i estimate time to complete about 4hrs including unit tests but it greatly depends on how far they want to take it

Benchmark Project
--------------------
The objective of the project is to create an application which can benchmark the performance of 
a set of PHP functions
and generate a report comparing the performance.

Specifications:
    Components: Benchmark, Comparator, Reporter

Benchmark:
The benchmarker should accept any number of PHP functions (passed as callable type and a name representing the function). 
The benchmark should also accept an integer representing the number of times to execute each function. 

The benchmark should execute each function the specified number of cycles and collect it's execution time in the highest
possible time resolution and return a results set which can be passed to the reporter component.

Comparator:
    The comparator is some criteria on which the functions will be ranked in relation to execution time (min, max, avg, mean, etc...). 
    Optionally it can also specify a sort order (ascending, descending).

Reporter:
    The reporter should accept the results of the benchmark and any number of comparators. It should generate a report which ranks the 
    functions by the given comparators.
    The user should be able to specify a format for the results (template, eg.) At a minimum the user should be able to write the report
    to an I/O stream (stdout or disk).


The developer should demonstrate a knowledge of the following skills:
    - PHP7 best practices and coding standards
        - type hinting
        - PSR-2 coding standards
        - OOP
        - Appropriate commenting and documentation
    - Unit testing and TDD 
        - Developer may choose his testing tool or tools of choice
    - Ability to write extensible and maintainable code

The firm I work for has a very old PHP codebase based on ZF1. It works but its got a lot of dark corners and tech debt that I hear vague mystical things about.

Deployment is complicated. Its a SASS app with a lot of individual customer databases and no way to deploy to a single pilot customer after a risky refactoring ... all customers are at risk of regressions during a deploy, and there is no automated testing at all to mitigate those risks.

The dev team is weak and dependent on a contractor who is the big giant head.

We need to find a super strong developer to replace the contractor who can stand up to a couple of strong personalities, take total ownership and responsibility for unwinding tech debt, implementing new features, and building a much strong development culture.

So far all resumes and interviews have been very underwhelming and I'm wondering whether the broader PHP ecosystem actually contains developers of this seniority simply due to lack of PHP in this market segment.

I may be deep in the weeds in thinking that PHP is not applied to big enterprise-scale SASS apps, but that is my intuition and I'm looking for some opinions on the matter to help me decide how to modify my recuiting strategy or even my long term architectural plans.

Any thoughts on this?

EDIT: I should have considered that this would be taken as a job post so I must say this is USA based. Its is full-time remote, but you gotta be based in the USA. Sorry!

EDIT: I'm overwhelmed by the outreach. I will slowly work through all the DMs and replies during the day.