It's also to do with India. There exists an even worse category of "small consulting" on places like odesk that caters to individuals and small businesses that

It's also to do with India. There exists an even worse category of "small consulting" on places like odesk that caters to individuals and small businesses that are very budget conscious and whose need for software development is oneoff or occasional. Many of these folks are self taught, semi trained, or generally fizbuz challenged. Some of these organizations will quote whatever price you want for whatever work you want, regardless of whether they even know what it is, let alone how to complete it. They keep the deposit, write some garbage, and then stall, delay, lie, or ghost you. I would estimate that around 80% are form south asian formerly British colonies that many Americans pejoratively lump together with India. A lot of the rest are from other low income countries that have a history of english langue proficiency, but none of then have the population that India does. Anyone who has encountered this ecosystem is going to be especially cautious hiring remote devs from India just because there are _so_ _many_ of them who have no business writing code. Unfortunately, as a competent dev, this is probably going to make it significantly harder to get through the early hiring filters at many places. I don't know what the solution is, but I'd maybe focus some effort on visible markers of status/competence like open source contributions, giving talks, etc to try to differentiate yourself.