Purism is hiring programmers to make as many GTK applications as possible use libhandy. Here the job offer: “GTK Developer for Adaptive Applications”.
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On upwork. Hmmm… Not a bad idea. 
This is a good sign, let hope they are many many contenders contributing.
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$10-$20/hr?
The rate stood out to me as well. That seemed low?
More than I make as a grad student…
I am on Upwork with a $5 hr rate. I don’t do Upwork for the money.
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+donations! 
Then why do you do it?
Woho Purism is definitely the best. 
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It depends. If the new hires are making new apps, it is low. If all they’re doing is layout modifications to existing code (which is what it sounds like to me), then it’s pretty reasonable.
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It definitely doesn’t sound like much, but things are different in FOSS than in commercial software development. I expect it to be meant as an extra encouragement for development that people are motivated to do already (to get programs to work with their device), not as a full salary.
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Most software development jobs, IME, are just doing maintenance work. I charge just as much for that as creating new applications. The reason why there is so much outsourcing in software is about the view of fungible developers.
IAC, $10-$20 is better than nothing, if you’re already doing the work for free.
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This is true, and how my current job works. I think what’s being advertised here, though, is more of a “temporary helper” position(s), which would explain why it says the duration is 3 months. Kinda like if my construction crew needed a few more hands for a particular building, I think.
I hadn’t looked at the salary when I posted about the hiring. Sure, Purism could wait for the community to do everything, but then the result will be that ugly mess that UBports and Plasma Mobile are at the moment and sell an expensive phone that doesn’t care about usability.
It is in their interest to pay well their programmers at this stage. Maybe in the future, when GNU+Linux phones will be the new normal and GNOME will have conquered the world, Purism could just take care of releasing open source firmware updates for their hardware and nothing more, but at the moment they are the only ones that really care about Phosh, so this is definitely not the moment for stopping.
The fact that they are hiring is a good sign. I cannot really comment about the salary, since I don’t know what the job actually is. For sure there is a big difference between $10 (basically a minimum salary in some western countries) and $20 (the double).
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If you have time to elaborate on this, I would be interested to hear more about it. Like, what does this mess consist of and why do you think it is ugly. 
What is needed to make this kind of projects work well?
In my opinion UBports is a dead end. Besides its lack of developers, its idea of convergence is flawed by design (more than a convergence it looks to me like a divergence between phone and PC usage) and it does not have a software stack of reference like GNOME and KDE do, so it is not clear to me how the software written for it can benefit the community.
As for Plasma Mobile, it is repeating the same mistake of KDE for the desktop: the latter clones Microsoft Windows, and now the former clones Android.
No DE is like GNOME for me instead: no fear of experimenting with the future without looking at the past and lovely workflow (usability).
Moreover I often find GTK software smoother than QT software, but that is my personal preference. Side note: For who doesn’t like GNOME, someone is creating a mobile version of XFCE: ExpidusOS, which is still based on GTK. Maybe something to keep an eye on?
So, going back to your question, what is needed to make KDE and UBports work well? The answer is always the same: love
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LOL. Currently reading, Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe. Very good so far; I’m looking forward to the chapter on technology work. https://sarahljaffe.com/appearance/book-launch-work-wont-love-you-back-by-sarah-jaffe/
I don’t think the upwork posting was the same as the fulltime job postings, but I agree that you tend to get what you pay for. I think libhandy is pretty much already designed, so maybe they are just trying to get more usage testing out of the upwork posting. IDK.
I make more then that working support for a software company. We do some basic Powershell scripting/troubleshooting, and some API stuff. Nothing as complicated as actually developing an app though. A bit on the low end I think.