Originally Posted by edgeprod

I would recommend you stop listening to this individual. Until you have at least 5 years of experience, you aren't going to be working on any projects where the speed of PHP is an issue.

Learn PHP and Javascript, learn to problem-solve, learn to communicate effectively, learn why testing and documentation are important, then learn to be rock-solid reliable. If you learn these things, you will have more work than you know what to do with.