The other developers work on the upstream project, Bitcoin Core. It is not clear to me why you think he's joking. Irrational takes like this are par of the course for him.
Discussion
How much would you have to get paid to inspect knots code?
How much do you get paid to contribute to core?
I would like to see core make steps towards helping hashers become miners again, constructing their own templates and running their own nodes.
Core should have mining features ready to go with 1 click for the pool hashers to switch to decentralized mining.