[sebhack]

I totally agree with the author. I've had similar experiences with Elance/UpWork. I'm a Senior Software Developer from Europe and I can't really compete with developers who offer their services for $20/h. But still, it's not impossible to get a job. I worked on a few projects that were mostly already started projects from cheap software firms that couldn't complete the job for whatever reasons. The clients I met were usually frustrated, burnt a lot of money, didn't have any experience about software development and/or management and were hoping to save the project by hiring a more experienced developer to fix the project. The codebases I've seen were awful. For example, no git repository, just a plain ZIP file, unstructured PHP code with 300 warnings, duplicate code... I'm sure there are all different kinds of projects on UpWork, also good ones. But these are hard to find and I doubt UpWork is the right place for experienced Software Developers with higher rates.

[EugeneOZ]

Just ignore developers with lower rates. Good employers often understand what is adequate rate and they realize they can hire somebody cheap and teach them, or hire professional and learn from them. So with higher rate you will attract better employers. Even more: employers check profiles of most expensive developers first :) Though sometimes they just completely ignore your rate and just "want to discuss" - people are different.