Like everything else in life, it depends.

If you're a run-of-the-mill developer with some exposure to PHP, rudimentary knowledge of HTTP and working knowledge of HTML, CSS, JS, consider ~ RM 3-6K (a month, that is).

If you're fairly skilled with sufficiently well rounded exposure, consider between RM10K - RM15K (a month). Of course, finding an employer that will pay you that much will be a significant challenge in and of itself.

As you can see, the situation in Malaysia poses a particularly difficult economic conundrum:

1. employers are not willing to pay compensatory rates for skilled employees, and
2. employees don't see the value of investing time/effort in building their repertoire of skills as there is no market willing to pay equitable rates

To make matters worse for Malaysian employees, our regional neighbours (Indonesia, Philippines etc) are hungry, speak the same language as us, and are willing to work hard and cheap for the dough. Smart employers leverage regional talent which further dampens demand for Malaysian employees.

Skilled hackers hit this realization roughly at the age of 30, and conclude that there is a triply-forked path ahead of them:

1. Go freelance or start a company/startup
2. Go down the sales/management career path where five-figure monthly salaries are possible
3. Get lucky enough to work for the (international) tech giants

All three possibilities remove skilled hackers from the job market which explains the rarity of older skilled hackers in non-management roles. This has a material impact as technology capacity and knowhow is not kept within the organization, mentoring opportunities between seniors and juniors are lost, and every new batch of talented juniors end up re-inventing the wheel.

However, there is upside to all of this; technology entrepreneurs with keen understanding of developeronomics[0] will offer equitable or better-then-equitable rates to talented hackers and basically be able to snatch most of them up. In fact, there are couple of companies in the Valley[1] which have embarked on this hiring strategy and it is certainly working out well for them.

The tl;dr answer answer your question is that salaries aren't especially good if you're not skilled, and if you're skilled, you really shouldn't be working for the man in Malaysia.

[0] The Rise of Developeronomics - Forbes
[1] Klang Valley, that is

When I was working in Vietnam, 3 years ago, my monthly salary was around 20 million VND (give or take 1 million because my company had a checkpoint system to determine the exact amount we took every month) - 1000USD. With that money, I can support a family of 4 and live quite comfortably (I was not married then, and still live alone now).

In comparison, my parents earn around 12 million VND (600USD) total. They can also live quite comfortably, and buy luxury stuffs sometimes. Of course, they are 60 years old, so their daily expenses are not that big.

My brother and his wife, who together earn around 16 million VND (800USD), can support their family with 2 small girl toddlers. Because they are very small, his expenses are not big at this moment so they can live comfortably. But I imagine 3 years from now, when the little girls go to elementary school, he will need to spend much more for his daughters. So he better be saving some money from now!

BTW, my relatives and I live in Hanoi, arguably the most expensive city in the country. If you live in other places or rural area, the expenses will be much less.

This answer was written in 2017 and discussed about salary situation in 2014, but the salary range has increased significantly since then. Numbers in this answer are outdated in 2019!

The rumors of PHP’s imminent demise have been going on for at least a decade. Yet today 8/10 websites use PHP in some form. PHP manages to reinvent itself constantly, much thanks to frameworks such as Symfony and Laravel.

The reason PHP developers are underpaid is because there’s an abundance of them and the barriers to entry are low. It’s easy to write shitty code with PHP and this means that a large percentage of PHP web developers do write shitty code. It doesn’t mean PHP itself is shitty. It just lends itself to bad developer habits.

Whether a language should be approachable or not is a matter of design philosophy. I think barriers should be as low as possible to keep technology available to as many as we can. It’s a matter of democracy.

There are local PHP jobs here that make $12 an hour. In my mind the people are probably overpaid. I also know a guy who makes over 6 figures just working on WordPress sites in a small midwest town and as busy as he is, he’s probably not charging enough.

The title PHP developer doesn’t mean a lot by itself. If you are someone who uploads Real Estate photos onto a web site and can change which ones show up on the image carousel on the front page, you can probably learn that skill in an hour.

I also knew a guy who programmed in php all of the time and kept a massive in house system running and improving for years. He provided more value to the company than the owner the company ever understood. He was in the 6 figure range too and was probably worth twice what he was making.

While PHP is maligned the closer you get to Tech cities, it is the work horse that drives most of the web. As big as tech cities are, there are still a lot more people working across the rest of the word, and a high percentage of their web work is done with PHP.

So while I don’t have statistical evidence to back this up, I highly suspect it’s because of the range of responsibilities and skills of PHP developers.

I don’t want to stir a war, but software engineers in Viet Nam are scarce. We have software developers, programmers, coders, but I’ve only seen a select few of engineers during my stay in Viet Nam. Partly due to a limited number of companies whose systems are challenging enough for one to get to the engineer level.

One engineer can be paid $1200 to $2000, and I’ve seen an increasing number of engineers who get started at the latter range (closer to $2000). A senior engineer I know get paid $3000, and one technical lead gets paid $6000 per month.

FYI the companies that these acquaintances of mine work for are 50% local / 50% international.

I can’t say for the whole market though. This is within my network.

In rural of Vietnam,earning over 10 million VND or 427 USD per month(5124 USD per year) is a good salary

In place that near the urban center but not consider urban area,the good salary is usually over 15 million VND or 641 USD per month(7692 per year)

For the urban cities,a good monthly salary is over 30 million VND or 1282 USD per month(15384 USD per year)

While for the center area of big cities like District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City and Hoan Kiem District of Hanoi,the good salary should be over 50 million VND or 2137 USD per month(25644 USD per year)

With those salary in certain places you’re living,from rural to main center of the big cities,you can live very comfortable,spending on eating easily and still can save your money for the planning,like buying a house. But living in the big center area with high salary is the best.

There are a few reasons I can think of.

1. There's a lot of entry-level developers using PHP that brings the average down.
2. PHP is mostly used for normal smaller websites, and usually not for big and complex systems. Developers who's developing simple websites are less expensive.
3. PHP is mostly used in smaller companies where the pay is generally lower.
4. WordPress and the overall low barriers for new developers are likely to make more people call them selfs PHP developers even if they have very limited programming skills. They are of course a lot less paid than really skilled developers that solves complex problems.

The salary varies, depending on your background, qualifications, experience, personal skills, as well as your performance.

When I was working at HR Department in a local company, the mean net salary for a fresh university graduate is in the region of VND 5 million (equivalent to about USD 225). If you have a couple or some of years of experience, you could be offered with a twofold increase, namely VND 10 million (around USD 446).

Further noteworthy is that the amount of money that employers are willing to pay for their employees fluctuates according to major. That is to say, engineers tend to receive higher salary than financial counterparts, in the range of 20% to 30% as per my own experience.

However, I think that it is difficult and unreasonable to give an average salary for all kinds of people. Having said that, a good pay for a fresh university graduate in Ho Chi Minh City of Vietnam should be VND 7 million (roughly USD 312).

Overall, the pay in this country is quite low, compared to the rest of the world. This problem is attributable to poor education system, personal skills (especially soft skills), and language proficiency (principally English). If you are an expat, the wage will undoubtedly far higher.

That depends a lot on your experiences and skills. But mostly in Vietnamese companies, you’ll get paid by years of experience.

• New grad: ~$300 - $400. Some company like FPT Software might even offer new grad $500 if their skills is really good.
• 2 - 3 years exp: ~$500 - $800.
• 4 - 6 years exp: ~$1000.
• > 6 years: ~$1500 - $2000.

A guy in my previous company got paid around $2000 and he has > 14 years of experience, can code fluently PHP, Android, iOS, JS… But he has no management skill.

Of course those numbers I gave you above is just approximately. Your salary will vary depend on your coding skill, management skill etc… But I’m quite sure it’ll never reach more than $2500.

Beside, companies in HCMC pay more than Hanoi. That’s a fact. Consider that when you apply ;)

Well it depends. When I was single and did not have to support anyone, my then salary of 700USD (approx 15 mil in VND) was more than enough to cover my daily expenses and even allow me to live quite comfortably. But a good pay for someone who is married with kids should be at least 1000 USD to live comfortably. Please note that I am basing my estimation on the condition that you live in big cities (Hanoi or HCMC) in 2017.

On a slightly different note, a good pay for a fresh graduate in Vietnam (and I mean good, not standard) is around 450 USD (around 10 mil) while a good pay for someone with 3–5 years of experiences can range from 700USD to 1000USD depending on the demand. I’ve known many developers or BSEs who earn as much as 1500USD net per month.

We’ve got two questions here. I’ll do my best to cover them both.

The first one can be answered quite easily. The answer is - no. PHP is not dead nor dying and will not be dying in near future. The reason for that is simple, it’s fast and very accessible language. In my honest opinion, it provides you with pretty much all the tools you may need to build a web app, it’s easy to configure and is long enough on the market to find all the libraries you may ever need.

PHP is more than fine, it perhaps doesn’t share the same amount of hype that is to be found around JavaScript, sure, but at the same time, the language itself compared to JavaScript by many could be considered to be easily supreme for many reasons. And before Node.js supporters will come at me angrily, let me just say that I’ve been using both, and both have some pros and cons.

PHP won’t be endangered as long as it is used by big companies such as Facebook, so if you’re asking about whether PHP is dying or not because you’re thinking about learning that language, I would say go for it. It can be super fun.

Alright, so question number two. This one is tricky because it slightly lacks in context. Compared to Java experts, or C++ experts or probably even JavaScript seniors, salary provided by PHP skills might look smaller, well, probably is smaller. But I’ve noticed, at least at my market (Poland), that this is slowly changing and the salaries for developers tend to be less differentiated. At companies that actually care about technology and product, you probably can expect to have a very similar salary as you would get if you were Java/Swift/ another language developer.

It's declining in popularity, and generally PHP developers are making less than other developers.

It's still going to be popular for a long time, but it's a terrible choice for new projects, so generally the most common PHP projects will be maintaining legacy code, which is among the least desirable categories of project for most developers. So the best developers are fleeing for greener pastures.

Oh, and nearly 60% of developers who use it hate using it.

Dying? No. COBOL is still around. Barely any language dies. But it is losing mindshare, it does have a neglected ecosystem, and there are better options today.

Footnotes

in terms of salaries, vietnam is only better than the lesser developed asean countries of laos, myanmar, cambodia and timur leste. For entry level or students and those who earn less, In terms of portion of the salaries, room rent in vietnam is very high and takes a big bite from vietnamese salaries (only renting a room, not the whole apartment). See below salaries ranking in the asean countries.

What is considered a high salary in vietnam ? If you earn over 60 million dongs (usd$2,400) per month in vietnam, you can live very comfortably. But of course many people can or must survive with a lot less !!

Nobody pays them. You have donations that some ask for to continue development. Advertising if they are good at that, which they should capitalize on way more. Many are started and grow over a year or so, gain popularity, and other devs who use it add to it. Go look at Laravel or Yii2’s GitHub list of contributors. A few are the core devs, then the rest are people like me who found an issue or chose to solve an existing one. They pull and fix the code, and submit a pull request. If approved, it gets merged into the final product that everyone uses. So the final product a year or two later, is 75% community improved code contributed by 100s of people for free.

PHP has been around forever (1994) and is here to stay, at least for a long while. When I say forever, I mean relative to when the Internet went mainstream (1991–1993). I wouldn't worry about PHP going away any time soon. While other techs like Node have came about, any modern dev should know PHP.

They aren't creating Laravel or other frameworks to pay their bills. They use the framework to create websites, which pay their bills. A good framework dramatically cuts down the time to roll out a new website, makes creating the site much easier, and ensures they have a solid ground to build on. Making great use of security and other best practices.

Nobody, and I mean nobody with the exception of Fortune 500 companies, Facebook, Google, should be creating new websites from scratch. If you have a great idea, roll it out on a framework first as a prototype. Your idea could fall flat, and you want to test it as quickly and cheaply as possible. If it turns out to be the next Facebook, then you can consider having it coded from scratch.

You should not reinvent the wheel. It is unsafe and will take 10x longer, 10x the pain in the butt, and 10x the cost. If I was needing a website done, I would want a community pounded framework to ensure it isn't going to be hacked 2 mins after the site is live because they didn't use prepared statements and the login page was vulnerable to SQL injection or the sessions weren't vulnerable to session hijacking, or various other exploits that noobs don't even know exist.

A framework doesn't protect you from the “developer” from ignoring the built in functions to execute prepared statements or protect from XSS. They can still execute raw SQL from inside Laravel, or choose to echo raw user data on the page. However, most frameworks have their own functions. You can't stop them from being ignorant, but the framework has all the tools necessary, in the hands of a skilled developer who actually knows and uses it the way it is intended.

Do yourself and everyone else a favor… just use a damn framework!

Expecting the average appraisal every year and Started with the basic pay of 25–28K per month in hand which mean 3.6 LPA Package.

With in 4 year if the person switch the company then the package he will receive will be approx 8LPA.

That is my calculation on basic of my salary and appraisal I have recieved so far.

If the guys have insane skill like worked on multiple framework like Magento,WordPress,Prestashop,Larval,CakePHP and have sound knowledge of j query and java script and knows to configure Server and manage domains work on Plugins then in that case He may have a Package of 12LPA.

But getting this is very difficult as it required a lot of hard work and just completing your hours in office cant bag you a package like this.

You need to spend quality time to learn and work on these technology.