I really agree with what you said about convincing yourself there are other things to do. Certainly we were guilty of this. A great company culture is fantastic but wont mean anything if you don't have any revenue :)
There's a lot of comments here that are like "you can't be an Engineer, I spent years getting there. It's not that simple. Grumble grumble grumble... etc..."
We should be welcoming him into our field! But instead we're too focused on the terminology he used.
I think it's fantastic that the author is now in software and programming. Software development is one of the most affordable ways to change the world. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection :D
I'll throw in my hat for PHP. There will be many people who will tell you to avoid PHP and I would have agreed if it wasn't for the Laravel framework. Laravel 4 is really amazing, it carries the simplicity and power of Ruby on Rails over to the PHP world. As a framework it covers most of your typical newbie problems out of the box (e.g. plugging security holes and organising your code) and you'll end up doing things in one line of code that you previously did in 5. Laravel also basically forces you to write really reusable code by using their Eloquent ORM system.
Though my favourite great thing about Laravel is that the community IS ON FIRE (in a good way). You'll get a response to most questions on Stack Overflow or the Laravel Forum within a few hours or even less sometimes. The core dev team are friendly and really available to help out. I found that when people use Laravel they don't just use it, they love it and become almost strangely obsessed with it. It's also pretty new so you can safely assume that your skills will not go out of date really soon or anything.
I don't have any proper metrics but I can say it's not bad at all - only when compared to C# :P
I built a small system for internal communication (sort of like a an internal twitter/facebook)
I could not say enough good things about Laravel. It really is the future of PHP.
The only issue I've had with it is in deployment - because of composer it's a bit fiddly - I ended up using the PAAS Engine Yard for testing deployment (and I will use them for proper deployment) because it was super easy with them (just more expensive).
I work in a startup that chose .NET for our product and admittedly we only did it because one of our developers had a lot of experience with .NET. I definitely wouldn't use .NET a second time, mostly because as a startup I value open tools and freedom. I started working in startups to get away from corporate bureaucracy. And now with hindsight I now know that "just because your dev has experience" is never a good idea to do anything.
On that note - I'm working with PHP's Laravel framework for my next project, and despite the performance tradeoff it's an absolute dream to work with.