How in demand are nodejs developers in freelance?

Question

PHP

Good evening.
For five years now I have been writing sites in php (I use yii). Recently, I have been actively expanding my horizons: I have tried many different languages, frameworks, tools, etc. And I became sad because of the tool that I use. The puff itself more than suits me. Of the four most popular languages ​​for the web (python, ruby, javascript, php), I like it the most. But it has a very weak ecosystem. Of course there is composer, but it doesn't compare to its counterparts in other languages.
Banal example: I am writing a website. for styles I use stylus, instead of javascript - livescript. And the admin panel is written in coffeescript. It is necessary to compile all this during deployment, concatenate and shrink. There are many tools in Javascript for this, but I didn’t find anything convenient in puff. And this is not the only example. Just with the expansion of horizons came a different look at their instruments.
I really liked nodejs. Looks pretty tasty. That small experience of working with him also brought a lot of positive emotions. I've been waiting for yii2 for a long time, I thought maybe something would change with its release. Here came the beta - downloaded, looked: better than before, but still nothing. Therefore, I'm thinking of using nodejs as the main tool.
But one fact stops: the number of vacancies. I looked at vacancies on hh.ru in my city. php developed - about 20 with a salary of more than 30,000. And nodejs - none.
In the foreseeable future, I plan to crawl from the office to freelance. But I am not at all familiar with the labor market. Tell me, is this platform in demand? Or is such a shortage of vacancies only in the office?
I would be very grateful for any thoughts on this.

Answer 1

the situation in the labor market can be googled. You can provide yourself with a job if you want.
As for node.js, javascript is in great demand on the labor market, there is not much difference from whether it is on the server or on the client. Moreover, node.js can be useful for organizing your infrastructure, etc. Let's say in the case you described with the assembly of statics for a php project, no one bothers you to install node.js for assembly, configure it and have your own profit. I always use gulp/grunt + a bunch of plugins + livereload on my projects to build the frontend, and this does not prevent me from writing in php. I now generally try to make admins as single-page-apps, so there is generally a separate application entirely on js + restfull api on php.
Yes, and with the ecosystem in php, everything is pretty good, especially the last couple of years. Let's say I can't tell right off the bat if Composer has any obvious downsides compared to pip/bundler/bower/npm. Nevertheless, it was created with an eye to all the rake that pip and easy-install and npm went through, etc. I think the reason for this is the use of medium quality tools, pay attention to serious solutions like Symfony2/Zend2/Silex.
Well, yes, broaden your horizons. It became boring to write in php - write in node.js. For learning purposes - make some tool to organize your work, or something else. When you feel confident - find a project on a node and play around. You should always try to bring some variety to your work.

Answer 2

nodejs
It's more like remote work on some highload service, not freelancing. I don’t think that any studio or just a customer will require the use of nodejs, if you can get by with a framework out of the box.

Answer 3

Very in demand, no more than 2 weeks ago my client was looking for a nodejs+angular programmer for a big project. And this is not the first time when my customers are looking for such specialists, but they cannot find normal ones.

Answer 4

Demanded, even very much. Basically, you are asked to either make a site on Node.JS + Express or, on the little things, real-time communication with the main application via websockets

Answer 5

NodeJs is in high demand, but in many vacancies PHP will be written - because for a bunch of years some projects have been made on it and the customer is more confident in it.
Projects that need nodejs (moving away from php) usually have either high dynamism (chats, websockets ) or high load (when the existing php solution has already proved to be bad) on the node, and I do not regret anything. Her potential is huge. Using node-webkit is also a great thing, I hope it has a bright future so that you can use it in production.
Since you love yii, I can't help but offer my work in the php yii2 port on nodejs - Who wants to take part in the development of a JS framework based on the Yii Framework v2 architecture?I really want to find like-minded people in this matter.

Answer 6

To be honest, I myself asked myself a similar question, and for about a month I looked through orders for freelancing under the tag 'node'. In fact, there are very few orders. 1-2 orders in 4 days. This is very approximate, because. I didn't keep any statistics. And the orders were not great. As a rule, something already written on the node should be finalized, or it was necessary to write a module on the node for the php project.
These are the pies...
But I'm sure it's temporary. In a year or two, the situation on the market will be very positive for the development nodes.
PS I looked at freelancers for the same 'node' tag, and to my surprise there were a lot of them. And that's a good sign, IMHO.

Answer 7

It’s worth saying that as soon as ES6 is implemented, I’m sure the node will become more popular and the frames will seriously grow.