Ask HN: Do Americans stand a chance on freelance sites?

I rather doubt that. Nobody does really good work at that rate, not in this field. Cheap programmers do legendarily shoddy work on projects of any scale, and the employers worth working for know that.

Offer great work at a fair wage, and you'll be fine.

To paraphrase Howard Taylor, if you want to succeed as a freelancer, you need to be (A) the very best at what you do, (B) a great communicator, and (C) everyone's favorite person to work with. And I'd add that you need to be able to prove to a prospective employer that you are those things.

My strategy starting out has been to communicate relentlessly and deliver spectacularly. Really understand a client's needs and ask a lot of questions (and make a lot of comments) about a project before even putting in a bid. Do tiny $50 trial contracts well and quickly, and then offer to finish the job at a fair price. Always respond to messages the same day. Always get working software into the customer's hands as fast as possible, and polish the living daylights out of it jointly.

If you're awesome and people know it, nobody will want to hire the $10/hr crowd when they could get you.

Repeated response: > No, you aren't. No programmer does good work for $10/hour or less.

The implication: We are obviously worth more than $10/hour, and the problem is just that employers don't know that or can't find us.

This is a dangerous economic oversimplification. It implies that you just need to keep doing the same thing, but advertise better. That is not the problem here.

Yes, the work you do produces a great deal of actual wealth for your employers, more wealth than is generated by the middle manager they pay $50/hour. Similarly, fresh water is much more valuable to me than an iPhone, yet I can buy hundreds of gallons of water for the price of an iPhone.

We have had several decades during which the vast majority of the worldwide supply of programming talent was excluded from the hiring pool. Even within the U.S., a programmer located in certain states and cities has been able to command a higher wage on that basis. When you have been the beneficiary of artificial scarcity and consequential producer surplus [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus], it is easy to proudly and mistakenly relate your economic value with your actual value.

Don't get depressed when you see your work performed for $10/hour. You have not grown less talented or even less unique than you used to be; you had simply overestimated your uniqueness based on confounded experimental data. The great news is that in the meantime there has been someone exactly like you, someone who happened to exist in a different geography, whose wage has now gone up to $10/hour.

The only fix is niche work. Make yourself more unique. This won't work as well as it used to, since non-Americans can learn new skills too, but that is how capitalism works.