You'd be surprised. Content farms are always hungry, and people just feed them crap because the pay is low. But zero is the lowest pay of all, so why not pour your heart and thoughts and citations into some $5 essay for a content farm instead? Tech is the most indemand, and these days there is a market for any niche

>It was a lot more fun than dealing with the "tough customers" that would want you to log into their production server and make changes.

Oof, yeah. My idea of "tough customers" is kind of the opposite though - clients who want you to do something super specific but you don't have any access to peek in on the real server and figure out what's going on, so you have to make them this elaborate guide but can't experiment on the real thing so it's hard to give exact instructions