I'm an awesome Ruby dev and I'm on oDesk, I live in a city with basically no market for rubyists but I've stuck with it out of passion(I'd have to find something else to do with my life if I had to keep with Java and government/bureaucracy software), I've got perfect english and I'm 1 hour away from EST, I've got no doubt I'd be making nice figures if I lived in any hot startup/private sector spot. oDesk allows me to work and get paid doing what I'm good at.