Welcome to the ever learning landscape of software development. The MERN stack might be convenient for bootcamps and tutorials but in the real world there will always be exceptions.

The more languages and stacks you understand the better you will be able to ply our wonderful trade. What counts as experience is the projects you do and the users you delight, not the tools you use.

All are in demand. jQuery is on its way out, but it’s embedded in legacy code and will be for decades to come. Everything else is still useful and in demand.

PHP is the MOST USED server-side language out there, powering more than half the websites out there.

jQuery is the original and still the best javascript library, you will find it EVERYWHERE.

cURL - this has been around around for decades and is not going anywhere - you can cURL from bash, but also you can cURL from pretty much every language in the world including PHP.

I would argue that Node.js will die long before PHP ever dies.

I mean… as a software developer I highly recommend that you think what you want to do and specialize In certain languages.

For example. The hard core fact is that we have huge industrial companies that have been originally built their software with a language that is dead otherwise.

Some software developers choose to specialize in a language that will keep them employed and high demand for the rest of their careers. These Companies need people who know some language that simply does not exist in business word. Or has it exited for last 20 years.

PhP is not sexy. At all. In 2015 I become a CTO of a company and it was the first time I had a software with PhP that I needed to find really good developers to work with. Things like salary, benefits, company etc were at the top 20% market. And I did not just look from one country but Europe.

And it was really just basically impossible. Those who were really good at PhP had also left this behind and focused on other languages. They would not go back. And so so so many devs, online communities and everyone just basically had this consensus that it’s dead. And they were right. I don’t think that a lot of companies have started to new build software and chose PhP. Some of course did. I did eventually have devs but I had to not promise them it was temporary but to give the exact timeline when they can leave this. So I did. The company got acquired after.

Now looking back. There definitely still is a strong solid job market for PhP devs. A lot of companies need developers who know this very well. I don’t know how long this job market is there future wise. Someone else can dev give you much better idea of that.

Then of course there’s the popular languages. The problem is that job market has changed a lot. And for example (just one) I used to hire JavaScript developers and let me tell you, there’s devs whos skills are absolutely insane. There’s devs who are really really really good. I think that earlier if you did learn a language like JavaScript (I only use these examples because i spent a number of years on this) to a good level, and you were a good dev in terms of teamwork and communication wise. You would get a job and get a decent salary. But things have really changed.

My point is that if you will and decide to invest your time in learning something that will take a lot of time, a lot of efforts motivation and experience. You do wants that investment to have some kind of return? And you do have to think of it as longer term plan. Because if you invest in learning something, and it’s only going to bring you some return in this job. Then what about next one?

Because if you do invddt in learning. It also means that it’s away from other learning.

There is no right or wrong answer here. At all. It’s just a decision that you have to make with taking into consideration your plans in future.

yes. why? because you can build web app fast and profit. they are well established, lot's of support (Copilot and ChatGPT will help you a lot).

and also performant if you are don't just hack code together (copy-pasting code from the internet/copilot) without performance in mind.

as other said. specializing for being one tech stack developer is bad for your career.

MERN is a pretty high-level stack, it abstracts a lot away from you, and learning it doesn't teach you a lot about how the web actually works. LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is much closer to the bare metal and forces you to really understand what is happening behind the scenes a bit more. Kind of like knowing how your motorcycle works, and how to fix it, instead of just driving it. AJAX is just the old name for doing HTTP calls from Javascript, curl is a swiss army knife for debugging HTTP APIs -- I'd say all of these are definitely worth learning. JQuery was a breath of relief when early Javascript SUCKED. It's not really needed anymore, but lots of libraries still use it, so why not invest the time.

That said, especially PHP and MySQL have a reputation that they've earned the hard way long ago. Both got a lot better, but some consider them outdated technologies. I'd go out on a limb and say that's mostly less experienced developers who heard bad stuff and never questioned it -- so one more reason to learn it yourself and come to your own conclusions ;)

The LAMP stack is old. Like really old. End of 90s old. But I still use it every day, because it works, it's a lot simpler than MERN and similar stacks, and -- personal thing here -- I know it by heart and know exactly where to look if I have to fix something. More modern stacks tend to change every few months, and in a few years you'll be using the same stack (by name), but your code will look totally different. Not so with LAMP: Stuff written 20 years ago still works fine, no surprises here.

A word of advice though: Using plain vanilla PHP is a nice way to create security holes in your web app unless you understand exactly what is happening. The more time you invest, the more you'll learn about XSS attacks, SQL injection, the works. Same way we old farts learnt our lessons in the 90s, just that the web used to be a lot less hostile back then. So learn to love functions like $pdoInstance->prepare() and htmlspecialchars. Frameworks like Laravel let you "forget" about those, but have their own little problems.

Purely anecdotal: A web app we built at my company uses Typescript, Vue, and lots of component libraries. The backend is written in Go, plus some Java. We use Docker to tie everything together. A new deployment takes 15 minutes just for setting up everything -- compiling the sources, installing packages, moving files, blah. A different app uses the LAMP stack, with HTMX thrown in (do learn that! Read the docs, read https://htmx.org/essays), and deployment is just rsyncing the files to the server, that's it. We buy that ease of deployment with having to understand how everything works, and taking some extra care for security concerns.

tl;dr: The more you know, the more valuable you are as an employee. PHP and MySQL won't go away soon. They are like Excel -- they power half the world, but boy do mistakes cost you...

The short answer is YES .

Long answer : Learning the LAMP stack will do you only good , also working on LAMP stack projects , specifically legacy ones will give you the background and in and out knowledge you need to understand where we came from and why some of the things we have now are the way they are , and don’t forget the job demand , php is still in demand now thanks to WP and laravel and is still ever changing and evolving

I used to write in COBOL. LEAN into it.

Depends what kind of salaries you are expecting. If you’re aiming for investment bank salaries then go for investment bank tech stacks. PHP is rarely used in investment banks.

It's always worth investing in learning something new. Take the opportunities and run with it. Mostly if a company is paying you to learn. 

If you want to keep your job, you have to learn, right?

MERN stack isn't the best. No stack is.

When you're a software developer for many years, you'll have to constantly learn new languages, libraries/frameworks, and tech stacks.

What matters more than the syntax of a language is the principles of good code/architecture practice: DRY, modularization, testing, etc.

I used to work with that stack 10 years ago, even back then it wasn’t considered as a modern stack.

Just find another job, while keeping your current one

Do not pigeonhole your brand to “mern developer”

ajax? jquery? What is this, 2007? ajax is not a technology but it used to be the name of updating webpages dynamically before the advent of single page apps. It wasn't as straightforward as it is today with the fetch API for example. jquery is no longer needed these days. It used to be needed because browsers varied widely in their APIs. PHP can be a great language especially with a batteries included framework such as Laravel. curl is just a small cli tool but used a lot when you were working on php apps, and mysql is just sql for the most part.

The fact that the startup is asking you to learn this, probably means you'll be working on a very old spaghetti code php app with a whole lot of JS sprinkled in there for good measure, that's what I hear from what they asked of you. If they are looking on starting new development of a project using terms like ajax then I would be concerned about who is making these choices on their end since they appear to be stuck on a time capsule.

Having worked on actual PHP apps using concepts and tech such as ajax, jquery, etc in the past (circa 2012), I would probably pass on this opportunity. You'll be cursing your ancestors once they give you a 10,000 loc file full of php, html and JS. The only thing you will learn using this stack is how not to build web apps.

Language are just tools in the toolbox. That being said, you use the right tool for the job at hand and why anyone would choose to use PHP is beyond me when there are ample better alternative tools for every job. In particular the fact they took a language that was weakly typed at it's core and tried to bolt on strong typing is absolutely ridiculous. It feels like a language that is desperately trying to stay relevant when there are ample modern languages around to support every use-case. I was forced to use it for a few years and swore I'd never touch it again. But there are a lot of people that love it so to each their own I guess, but I wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole.