I'm Begging for Work

Because what an unemployed, self-taught person with a non-working spouse (and four children, one of whom is special needs) is a defamation lawsuit on top of things? I assume the poster is US-based and their are just certain realities of the legal system. Even if the suit is ultimately overturned, what kind of representation is he going to be able to afford if he is borrowing from family and his family is skipping meals?

The state of corporate ethics or even the particulars of who is to blame in his former job is completely orthogonal to his current situation.

It's close to impossible to get a remote job by the sheer amount of people wanting them. And no place will let you negotiate less salary for a job. :-/

I find myself as the same place as the the dev who wrote this. I don't even need a "dev-salary", we could live on the 44k a month and I would be happy with that as long as it's remote. Could go less, but it has to be a job that exists in ~5 years.

Entry-level for a good junior engineer is what you say it is, however senior/lead probably reaches around £100k for particularly impressive candidates, and finishes at around £60-80K for other engineers.

Contracting on the other hand seems to top out at about £650 pd. There £300-400 is entry-level, £400-450 is mid-level or low-end senior, and £500+ is high-end senior, architect or lead. Generally you get more if you work for financial institutions and have a skill that is extremely difficult to recruit for. Basically it's generally not about how good you are - that is the wrong frame. It's about how cleverly you have fit a pain point within the market.

My numbers might be a little wrong but it should give a general feel.

It's certainly unfortunate that there are engineers that are only making £22K but ultimately in many cases it's low confidence in testing the market. They can get more.

I am surprised that a CEO publicly declares photos to be useful. A photo is clearly bullshit - there's no useful information in a photo (unless it's "here I am accepting $PRESTIGOUS_AWARD last year") - and it raise risk of discrimination claims.

1) You are good dev and teamplayer, as other respected you, just that other guy steal the day somehow. Who knows, maybe he is someone closer to CEO or he managed to sell himself really good (CEOs often think like this: this new guy is expensive, have shiny CV, hence it is good. BMW is expensive and shiny, hence BMW is a good car).

2) I'm sorry you used the word f* during the talk, but it's not bad, this is your first real work after all. To be honest, your destiny has been determined long time ago when CEO started to look for alternative, so no matter how polite, honest or hard working you were, you would get fired at some point.

3) As others mentioned here, don't beg for work. Make your profile/blog looking professional, remove that post we all read here and write about Rails tricks you learn on daily basis. Write about it in weekly or bi-weekly span. Use blog to write about life, your kids and family (under different tag), so recruiters can see how positive you are (also CEOs and recruiters looooove devs with family as they can be easily locked within the company).

4) Start your own small business. You do have experience with plastics plants, go to your previous employer and ask to create a web page or a management tool for him. Offer it for free or a small fee; offer free support. You will see that people will start calling you after some time.

Be patient and the work will come. And good luck!