The author of this article has a reputation for an incredible sense of self-entitlement, he's the person who tried to do a hostile takeover of Redis after making a few minor contributions[0]. In light of that it's not too surprising that he's finding it difficult to find a job that meets his expectations.
> I can count people that provided an important contribution to the Redis code base in the fingers of my hand, and spare fingers remain. One of those contributors is Matt Stancliff, so I can't (and I don't want) ignore him when he disagrees about how the project is developed.[1]
This quote by antirez suggests they did made core contributions. Also the events you’re bringing to light seem to be rather old and not relevant to the theme. Being self-entitled is a bit cringey, though.
I agree, it was a long article and at first I was with him but after the first few hundred words the author seems to start complaining that his obviously sufficient work is not sufficient to get him a job which is nothing more than a logical fallacy and having a slightly big head, it says nothing about the wider job market as a whole.
Indeed it was very entertaining, relatable even, and at times a complete wish-fullfillment slasher flick!
But it kinda (definitely :D) misses the point that it itself set up at the beginning with the fancy FRED graphs ... almost in the same way as the author misses the point of (and thus the required choreography for successful) interviews.
(As others comments here mentioned that he seems to lack the self-awareness to correctly position himself on the bell curve meme, which gives him a lot of consternation.)
Strong opinions are great when you know when to deploy them :)))
At least he now seems to be self-aware, though it seems likely he wasn't so self-aware at the time of the odd proposal at a conference. Check out the GitHub sponsors link at the top of the article. I'm sure someone's going to take him up on the $12,000/mo one.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9176800