How IT Staffing Companies in the USA Secured the Future of Laravel

How IT Staffing Companies in the USA Secured the Future of Laravel

Pfizer. HelloFresh. The BBC. Liberty Mutual. These are just some of the companies who are using the Laravel framework to power their web presence.

But the question is… why? In terms of backends, Laravel is a relative newcomer, having been created in 2011 and not really taking off until around 2019. While some might point to the decline of CodeIgniter as one of the main reasons for Laravel’s meteoric rise, there is a far more market-driven explanation that fits this particular trend.

This story involves IT staffing companies in the USA, a global pandemic, and a steadfast Arkansas Tech grad who kept his eyes on the prize. Welcome to the amazing story of Laravel.

Laravel Development Services, Straight Out of… Hot Springs?

Arkansas isn’t exactly seen as a hotbed of tech. It’s a state known more for tornadoes and folk music than kanban boards and codebases. Still, there is a university that fosters the curiosity of the technically minded: Arkansas Tech, which is ranked 65th out of 135 regional universities in the southern US.

That was where Taylor Otwell honed his craft, graduating with an Information Technology degree, and eventually going to work for ABF Freight in Fort Smith. But Taylor wanted to start his own business. In order to do so, he needed an alternative to CodeIgniter that would have native support for authentication. So he built one.

That was Laravel Beta, which quickly became the 1.0 release after some bug fixes. It was June of 2011, and Taylor took the positive reception of his code as a good sign. September 2011 saw the release of Laravel 2 which included community contributions that he vetted and approved. It had the Blade templating system. Laravel 3 came out in February 2012, with the Artisan command line interface and the Bundles packaging system.

At some point, one has to admit that the incredible infrastructure created as part of a business plan is the business. Widely praised for its clean syntax and organized structure, and having gained a core following and a helpful community that would support new users with the help of some truly detailed documentation, Laravel was the real deal.

According to an interview published on Medium, Taylor worked at UserScape for a while, under Ian Landsman. Ian made sure that the last week of every month was available for Taylor to make updates on Laravel.

Not that Taylor ignored Laravel for the rest of the month. He said that during that period he would often come home, hang out with his family until they went to bed, and then work on the codebase until midnight or one in the morning.

Thanks to that nocturnal dedication and to Ian’s amazingly open minded scheduling decision, Laravel continued to grow rapidly. Taylor made it his full time job as of late 2014, working out of his home in Hot Springs.

Between early 2015 and late 2019, Laravel saw steady growth. There were real life conventions called LaraCon in the US and the UK, and other international meets under the Laravel Live branding.

But at the start of 2020, Laravel saw an absolutely massive spike in usage.

I wonder what happened then?

The Pandemic, the Top IT Staffing Agencies in the USA, and the Light at the End of the Tunnel

AUN Digital notes that the dramatic rise in Laravel downloads and usage started to happen right as the Covid pandemic became a reality in early 2020. This was no coincidence. First of all, people were losing their jobs, and millions of entrepreneurs were born in those trying times.

But Laravel benefited from the rapid adaptation that IT staffing companies in the USA had to make in a pandemic stricken world. These companies selected certain technologies that were considered ‘hot’ or ‘up and coming’ and evaluated them for how friendly they were as far as remote working conditions were concerned.

Laravel had built in remote authentication support, powerful command line functionality, and was considered incredibly easy to use when compared to its peers. It was perfectly positioned at the time when the world needed it the most.

IT staffing companies in the USA started contacting individuals and assembling teams with Laravel experience. They became the core workforce for companies new and old who needed to adopt or transition to a flexible backend framework. Soon their peers in the UK, Canada, and Australia followed suit. Laravel development services became a truly global industry.

Demand skyrocketed, and it was more than just hype from headhunters. Once companies got a taste of what the framework could do, without any human beings within a mile of their offices or servers, they were happy to integrate it into their business and create standards around it. Everyone wanted to hire a Laravel developer, who would be paid well to use the framework out of the comfort of their own home. The top IT staffing agencies in the USA were barely able to keep up with demand.

By the time the Covid pandemic was deep into the recovery stages for most of the planet, Laravel was the most popular framework in the world. As of April 2024, there were over 29,000 Laravel positions listed on Indeed. That’s 240% more than Symfony, and over 360% more than CodeIgniter or Yii.

Is it Laravel, or is it Love?

One interesting statistic to come out of this period was exactly how much the people who used Laravel actually liked it. One might think that’s hard to gauge, but there’s a fairly clean way to do so: GitHub Stars.

A user isn’t forced to rate anything on GitHub. There’s no real benefit to doing so, and there’s no artificial roadblock that demands such an action to progress. So GitHub Stars are a seemingly genuine way to show appreciation for an open source project, barring outside manipulation of course.

If we ‘size up’ the number of stars given to the number of downloads of the popular frameworks, keeping the same ratio, we get a kind of ‘golden number’ of the average amount of love their community has for the product. We have a ratio that represents the fraction of that community who took the time to say ‘this is great, thank you’.

In early 2024, Laravel had 76.5k stars for 24 million downloads. That’s our benchmark. Yii only had 15 million downloads, so we’ll multiply their stars by 1.6 to compensate… but they only come in at 21.1k. Phalcon’s adjusted score after multiplying by six is 39k stars. Zend is 27.8k. CodeIgniter is 35.4k. Symfony is 32.6k GitHub Stars after pumping up its score for the difference in total downloads.

None of them come within throwing distance of the appreciation given to Laravel. And it should be noted that Laravel is one of the youngest code bases out of the bunch. It’s no wonder that the top IT staffing agencies in the USA pushed the candidates who had mastered this technology for three solid years, non-stop.

The extensive documentation, reasonably priced support and courses, community resources, and real life meetups combine to make this kind of score possible. Which means that a company hiring Laravel development services is more likely to result in motivated, genuinely interested coders who have a solid support network behind them.

Are IT Staffing Companies in the USA Still in Love with Laravel?

The last half of 2024 saw a general drop in demand for all IT jobs globally. Laravel wasn’t immune to the layoffs that happened all over tech.

Not to mention that the US Congress amended Section 174 of US tax law. The Wall Street Journal and many others have covered this, but in a nutshell, software development isn’t considered a research cost that can be taken as an immediate loss.

Gergely Orosz explains the impact quite succinctly:

‘These parts deliver the blow by making it clear that software development costs need to be amortized over 5-15 years. Most experts expected Congress to push back the Section 174 amendment to a later date, or simply remove it.’

But they didn’t. And this tax change has had a dramatic cooling effect on software engineering hires across the board.

But of the software engineering jobs available in the US, Laravel is still quite popular. And US tax law hasn’t hurt hiring in places like the UK and AU, where companies are more than happy to take on experienced backend engineers who already know how to work remotely.

Love it or hate it, Laravel is global now. And that works directly to the benefit of those who have taken the time to master it.

Laravel Development Services with a Global Reach

The efforts of IT staffing companies in the USA during the pandemic seeded Laravel in thousands of companies all over the world. And the continued dedication of Taylor Otwell and the organization he built has provided fertile ground for trained backend software engineers to pursue their career goals aggressively.

But with the changes in US tax law blunting the US market for developers, where in the world should Laravel specialists turn?

Arguably, the UK, Ireland, and Eastern Europe are some of the best places to find companies who want to hire Laravel developers in late 2024. Why?

New businesses are opening up in these countries all the time, while older businesses often have branches in all of these places. But the reasons corporations embrace the UK, Ireland, or Eastern Europe are quite different.

New and existing businesses in Ireland take advantage of the highly favorable corporate tax laws that are often talked about in tech circles. This tax advantage is why Dublin hosts just about every multinational tech giant imaginable, in whole or in part. It’s nicknamed the Silicon Docks for a reason. There’s also a significant green tech presence there that shouldn’t be ignored.

The UK, on the other hand, is fairly average when looking at corporate taxation in western Europe. But it also plays host to London, one of the largest FinTech centers in the world. Just about every major bank and investment firm in the world has a presence there, with tens of thousands of new (and very well funded) SMEs opening every year. And although nobody can hold a candle to the US in defense tech, there are multiple UK defense firms offering Secret clearance jobs to the right overseas candidates.

Arguably, the best of both worlds might be companies in Northern Ireland. Because they occupy a unique space in post-Brexit Europe, they have some excellent taxation advantages and market access. But the cost of living and commercial rental prices are both pleasantly low. That’s why Belfast has become a mini tech empire, with business parks filled to the brim with startups and SMEs.

One of the hottest emerging markets in recent years has been Eastern Europe, for obvious reasons. Taxation is a hot topic for many businesses, and many of these countries offer a low headline CIT rate. For example, Poland capped its standard corporate tax at 19%. Romania’s headline CIT is 16%. And for non-banks, Ukraine has a CIT of only 18%.

It’s no wonder that tech companies are flocking to Eastern Europe. And with the new jobs comes English language proficiency, meaning that the top IT staffing agencies in the USA are happy to offer their Laravel-proficient candidates for these positions. It’s estimated that 30% of Polish people speak English. That figure is 31% in Romania. It’s under 8% in Ukraine, but that figure is rapidly rising.

In short: When looking for IT staffing companies in the USA who have an edge over their counterparts when finding and placing Laravel engineers, a presence in the UK, Ireland, and Eastern Europe is incredibly beneficial.

Digis as an International Laravel Staffing Company

Not to toot our own horn, but Digis happens to have points of presence in both the US and the UK. With a global team that consists of over 200 IT specialists, many of whom are Laravel gurus, we can attest to both the popularity of the framework and the importance of having international reach.

When the Covid pandemic hit, over 80% of our people transitioned to remote work. And in a lot of cases, remote is the norm for our people.

It’s an arrangement that benefits everyone: Companies get flexible remote staffing, and software engineers benefit from being able to find work on both sides of the pond. It’s one of those rare win / win situations that also has a lot of resilience, because no one country’s economy, laws, or tax regulations can stop the march of progress.

If there are any questions about this topic, or if there are staffing needs to be discussed, contact us today.