Just finished watching.
This guy said he was very clearly told that this was a contract job with a firm 18-month term with a 6-month gap between contract terms and he took it anyway. First because it paid more than his current job and he needed to effing eat and secondly because he wanted to give little kids the same magic he felt opening Forza as a little kid on Christmas.
Then he got to work making the game as the guy who made rocks and mountains, but not trees, and he was doing that until the contract of a really senior person ended. This senior contractor was so important that the project could have collapsed without him but he was being mercilessly fired at the end of his contract anyway. This meant that the narrator had to actually learn how the tools work, which apparently really hard and is his definition of crunch.
Then he worked his way up to doing R&D, which meant figuring out how large the textures could be before breaking the engine, while also doing development, which was making textures that didn't break the engine. People started to see the work the Forza team was doing because stuff was going up on Twitter and he was really happy.
Then he was told his contract was ending. By this point in the story he seems to have worked his way into the position of being the grizzled and indispensable old timer so he said he asked if he could be hired as a full time employee, but his lead said no. So it's obviously because the higher ups needed a third house while his only option was to have no job for 6 months. He didn't have time to do documentation so the wisdom he had accumulated couldn't be passed down because he never wrote anything down before that. So his contract ended and he found a different job, which must have been 6 months later as he had previously said not having a job for 6 months was his only option. But he didn't clarify.
Seems like it would have been a perfect piece for Jason S. to add to his long list of development crunch exposés. Maybe JS will signal boost it to highlight the realities of accepting a contract job with Microsoft.