[armabiz]

This is just one of those examples where experienced freelancer will see flag "avoid!" for such kind of clients.

The truth is that places like odesk/up work/anything is just big market. There are clients willing to hire low-rate developers and micro-manage them, but at the same time there are clients who want to hire top talents from the marketplace to deal with complex tasks and get really top solutions.

Somehow I could find really interesting work in high-load startups with 4M visits/m, OpenSource or even Y-combinator startups with good culture.

To be clear, during ~10 years of experience I was at both sides of barricades: hiring developers/designers/marketeers and being software developer/freelancer myself.

So it's just experience grew into skill when you had all that shit like non-paying/rude/time wasting clients and feel how to avoid that.