Topic: Career in PHP, my new employer wont use OO! is it essential?

[Dunhamzzz]

I'm a young PHP developer, now in my second job, I moved a long way across the UK to get here (was a good payrise) this is a bigger company, more employees, a lot more sites but after 1 week I have just discovered there is absolutely no Object Orientation or other coding conventions and they have absolutely no plans to gear towards it.

My questions are, do you think it is going to be valuable to my career to stay in this job for much longer/if at all? I could also go back to my job, at the small firm, who use OO and I learnt a hell of a lot in my time there.

So really, is OO that valuable? is it the way forward? I wouldn't want to stay in a job that enforces me not to use it in coding practice when support for it is becoming bigger and bigger, and especially now that php5 is settling in rather well. Im lookngi to develop myself, which is going to happen here.

Thanks,
Id raelly appreciate some constructive responses to help me make this biggy!

[cooldude832]

I myself do not do any OOP simply because I don't like the concept of objects, but that is because I am a numbers person.  OOP does offer some advantages in some cases, however  I think 90% of what can be done with OOP can be done without.  However if you are an e-commerce junkie you probably swear your life upon OOP because all the shopping carts run on it.  Overall I say if your at a successful company making good money and you know OOP and no one doesn't, done leave because a day will come when OOP is needed and you will be the first person they turn to.

[jesirose]

No, OOP is not essential, it is just a good model. Saying you can write good code without using OOP is like saying you can write without using functions. Yes, it's possible, but it's not as effective as it could be.

[Dunhamzzz]

I don't care about the effectiveness, or how hard the job will be. I just want views from a career perspective. I only really got into OO in my previous job, Do you think it is something employers will require? Isn't it kinda old? The company im with say they're using php which ushed me towards them but really all their code could run on php4. I thought that was the whole point of php, all the new OO implementations.

I'm only 19, so I can't see myself being at this job for the rest of my life!

[roopurt18]

They might have technical reasons for not using OOP, such as a large number of sites that would break if the upgraded their server(s).  It really doesn't matter if you're programming in OOP or using procedural methods.  You can still learn and use OOP for your personal interest / projects and I highly recommend doing so.  In fact I recommend you take time to learn more languages than just PHP; I'd start by learning a little more about MySQL or Javascript as they're very relevant to PHP.

The major downfall to procedural coding is it lends itself to a populated global namespace, many constants, and a bit of code repetition.  Neither style is more effective in terms of execution, although slight variances in execution time will occur.

[Dunhamzzz]

I already know mysql, and I have enough javascript knowledge to get by.

after expressing my concerns, they've decided to let me start all my projects with the zend framework.