As someone who occasionally does recruiting for developers and always do some quick searches for GitHub profiles. You'd be dropped as a potential candidate on our team if we stumbled upon this, "After he signed and I began building he decided to pivot and not pay me."
Surely the guy not paying is the unprofessional one?
Sure, since "he signed", he could have probably taken legal action, but that's often a long and costly process. How is cutting your losses and walking away (but outsourcing the code you wrote) unprofessional?
And yet, I read his comment, and I read your comment, and if I had to choose who to work with in any capacity (I could be any of employer, employee, vendor, customer, purchasing agent in this arena), it would be him over you.
Just saying the word "professionalism" doesn't make you the one who is more professiional, or make your concept of professinalism the better one.
I'm a bit confused here. Do you think he should have accepted his fate and moved on to the next project? And at best just whine about it on online forums.
As a dev who does interviews/evaluations it would be a red flag for me, and would affect the lens through which I view every answer/interaction with the candidate.
I think there is a different way to phrase this, something like “this is the result of a collaboration that didn’t end up working out” or whatever. I get that it’s kind of mealy mouthed, but it avoids any aura of conflict in the evaluation.
Just screams unprofessionalism in my opinion.