Does anyone know of any salary survey/comparisons regarding Moodle developers vs other PHP roles such as Wordpress etc? Full time and contract rates would be great. If not, would you be taking part in such a survey?
I do not believe there is any such survey for Moodle. This may be influenced by the relative size of the market and the effect of the limitation on the use of the trademarked term Moodle.
To give a comparison a quick search on the terms "percentage of websites using Wordpress", my scientific analysis of the results (picking the first one without glancing at the URL), said "WordPress' market share is 43% of all websites.". Moodle by contrast would be a tiny, tiny percentage of all web sites. So there are fewer Moodle developers to survey.
Because you cannot simply set yourself up and advertise as a specialist in Moodle Hosting/Developing without being in a relationship with Moodle HQ that limits the number of people who are obviously Moodle developers. That doesn't stop people of getting into that market as independent developers, but it does limit the scope of promoting what you do. There are ways of mitigating this, for example writing excellent technical books on Moodle development (e.g. https://mukudu.net/publishing/m39plugindevelopment/index.php) and posting in these forums.
To give a comparison a quick search on the terms "percentage of websites using Wordpress", my scientific analysis of the results (picking the first one without glancing at the URL), said "WordPress' market share is 43% of all websites.". Moodle by contrast would be a tiny, tiny percentage of all web sites. So there are fewer Moodle developers to survey.
Because you cannot simply set yourself up and advertise as a specialist in Moodle Hosting/Developing without being in a relationship with Moodle HQ that limits the number of people who are obviously Moodle developers. That doesn't stop people of getting into that market as independent developers, but it does limit the scope of promoting what you do. There are ways of mitigating this, for example writing excellent technical books on Moodle development (e.g. https://mukudu.net/publishing/m39plugindevelopment/index.php) and posting in these forums.
Thanks for that Marcus - love the link ;)
I am trying to get data to prove or disprove that *specialist* Moodle developers usually are paid more than standard LAMP and even WordPress developers. That is my personal experience having now done over 9 years of Moodle/Totara dev but then again I have other web dev experience that might be skewing my particular circumstances. How else can I convince PHP devs to read the book