Maintaining is not the goal. Say you get a job that pays senior engineer money, and they fire you after maybe three weeks of you just saying "it depends" and pretending your connection is bad. You still made like $5,000. And you're probably running more than one of these scams at a time. And you're doing this from a relatively poor country with not much formal education. 100% worth it.

And who knows, maybe you manage to actually KEEP one of those jobs, which given how bad some employers are at figuring out who's good and bad at this stuff, is entirely plausible.