The contract that ended a job hunt.
Five minutes of one man talking to camera, telling the story he says made him stop applying for jobs. He sets it aside from the bigger one first: “there’s a grander narrative for why I got into crypto” and he may put that on camera later, but this is “the short story, the TL;DR”, the thing that explains “why I started working for myself and bet on myself rather than continuing to apply for software engineering jobs for another 6 months”.
It starts with a gig. “I got this gig working for a young man in Florida”, he says, and the man is a blank in his memory now: “He was a very charismatic young man. I can’t remember for the life of me his name at this point.” The offer was half of a marketing contract, “50% of a contract gig that he was offered $10,000 to run a social media marketing campaign for an NFT project”. The project he liked. “It was called Story something, StoryDAO. It was a cool idea.” Art posted daily, people writing the lore, all of it meant to be minted: “They got this really large community of people together in Discord, and everybody would write a story.”
Then the work turned. “he kept asking me to do illegal things with Twitter”, he says, not felonies but the grey kind, to “break their terms of service and violate their agreement and spam people and use bots in ways that were dishonest”. His argument was that none of it was necessary, that they could “actually run a paid marketing campaign on Twitter, which is what you’re supposed to do when you run campaigns”. It did not take. “when he realized I wasn’t going to build him the janky pseudo-illegal automations that he wanted, he dipped.” Then, flatly: “He just dipped with their money. Didn’t pay me.”
What he took from it is the part he keeps returning to. He went back to the client team, worked out that “what he promised them was really deliverable” on the budget, that “he could have just done it honestly”, and that “That’s pretty much all this kid had was that he knew how to talk about the product.” So: “I would be crazy not to bet on myself.” By then “it had been 6 months at that point since I got my degree and certification in machine learning and data science and Python”, and “6 months later, still no job.” He says “I’ve probably applied to 150 jobs a day”, and wishes he had stopped sooner, even knowing “That shit’s scary and hard to do, man.” The proof he needed was somebody worse at it doing fine.