[ageitgey]

The poster is 100% correct but kind of missing the point of the platform. Upwork is essentially a platform for US people to hire cheap, interchangeable labor in low-wage countries. Anything else that happens on Upwork (like someone actually making a fair wage) is just a happy accident.

For companies who need a random jobs done like data entry or data cleaning, it's an amazing service where an army of freelancers will fight over your meager $200 budget. They put the cheap labor through hell because they know they can - all in an effort to make the hiring experience better than hiring local help. The person hiring has 110% of the power. The first clue is that the hiring person literally gets to spy on your screen 100% of the time which is insane and not a working condition you should accept form a real job.

If you are a US/UK/other expensive place developer, you should not be using Upwork to find work unless you literally have no contacts and no experience. It's the very bottom of the barrel of consulting. You should be building your own client relationships in your own market. If you can do that, you can easily earn 5x - 10x what you can earn on a commodity platform like Upwork. But if you are in the Phillipines and you can make double a local wage helping someone far away clean up a spreadsheet, that might make more sense.