Pretty damn close to straight PHP I'm guessing. Am using for the webUI on an embedded device, manufactured by one fortune 100, for another.
In prior gig for a startup last Aug-Nov, they used Symfony and lost projects for 2 of the most heavily visited websites in the world. Home page took 10s if not 100s of thousands of function calls to render, I know cause I profiled them with XDebug after the fact. They laid off 1/3 of their workforce last week.
Could you elaborate on this? It sounds a bit far-fetched that Symfony (a PHP framework) would solely be responsible for losing a company 2 huge contracts and laying off 1/3 of their workforce. 10s of thousands of function calls for a home page? What did the home page do?
I personally have been very impressed by Symfony (version 1.1 was just released this week so it sounds like your experience was with version 1.0 or a beta version), the Symfony community, the IRC channel and the documentation (a full print version book which is really well-written with all of the contents available online for free as well). In the few benchmarks I've seen that actually bothered to include Symfony, it seems to measure up quite well.
Symfony powers Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Answers and at least some portion of Delicious, by the way.
(Sorry to jump in with a first post questioning what you've said, but I would like to understand better what your experience was in order to be aware of potential pitfalls that may be lurking around the bend for me.)
I think this "2-3 hours of real work per day" stuff is a myth. Or maybe this depends on a definition of "real work" that only entails "heads-down" "in-the-zone" coding. Still I think it's too low. I'm 44 and just a month and a half ago I had to intensely focus 9-10 hours a day to meet a very aggressive deadline (PG you are so wrong about us older coders ;) It was exhilarating and while I wouldn't want to keep that up for months on end, I think 5-6 hours heads-down is definitely do-able. What about the other 2-3 hours to come to an 8 hour day? Well, there's analysis, documentation, email, etc. Some people like to do this sort of thing first thing, but then is when I focus best. Indeed by mid to late afternoon my brain is craving television, but I force myself to at least think about problems, even if I'm not solving them through code. And it usually pays off, with a solution through code the next morning. Anyway that's my experience.
Contractors _don't_ get paid four times as much as hourly employees. Oh sure, companies might get billed four times as much (though in my experience it has 1.5 to 2.5 times as much: I've seen invoices sitting on my boss's desk, and once even the consulting company mistakenly sent the invoice to _my_ address). Contractors probably get paid 1.25 times as much on average: the rest goes into some suit's undeserving pocket.
The contractor company employees don't get paid four times as much, but none of those factors apply to them: they have full time jobs, rather than billing their employer (the contractor company) for only hours worked, and the contracting company still has to pay for accounting overhead and taxes.
If you become an independent contractor, doing all your own taxes and client interface, you'll quickly realize that those "undeserving" suits are saving your sanity by doing all the people-handling and drudge work that you, as a hacker, would hate.
Also, in that situation, those suits pay their employees full time even when the contracted hours this week only add up to 18 hours. They bear the risk of having that happen, and in return, they soak up the profits when they get to charge the contractee for 60 hours worked in a week and still pay only salary to their own employees.
In the case with which I'm most familiar, the contract is for two days a week at $50/hr, and the employee of the contractor company gets ~$12/hr (here in the deep south, that's livable; he owns his own home). That may sound terrible to you, but on days they don't have anything for him to do, he still gets paid. It's a tradeoff.
