They asked me what I thought were the big differences between PHP versions. I answered honestly — that to me, one of the biggest shifts came with PHP 8, particularly with the ability to use classes as property types for attributes. That kind of type safety and structure brought PHP closer to more strictly typed languages, which I found to be a big step forward. He corrected me, saying it was actually introduced in PHP 7.4 or even 7.2 — though he wasn’t quite sure himself. Then he pressed me on whether I knew of other important changes. At this point, it felt like the conversation wasn’t really about sharing practical experience or real-world use of these versions — it was more like a trivia quiz, where only textbook-perfect answers counted. I did know other features — like arrow functions, match expressions, constructor property promotion, nullsafe operators, attributes, JIT — but I didn’t feel like listing them off like a robot, especially in a setting where the interviewer seemed more interested in correcting than in connecting. The point wasn’t that I didn’t know them — it’s that I didn’t want to recite them like a changelog to prove my worth.