I'm approaching 50, and I still get recruiters calling me -- and when I've interviewed for a job, I usually get an offer. That's been true for at least 4-5 job

I'm approaching 50, and I still get recruiters calling me -- and when I've interviewed for a job, I usually get an offer. That's been true for at least 4-5 job interviews over the past 15 years for me. I'm not saying this to boast, only to point out that, while some companies probably are ageist, they aren't all. And some of the larger companies offer really good salaries. Another comment mentions the fact that interviewing or marketing yourself may be an issue. It also may be that you're not in the right geographical area, or that you're not interviewing at the right companies, or that your skill set on paper doesn't include the current high-paying buzzwords. Oddly enough, Android development has been one of the highest demand items for me recently. I do think the full stack development world may be oversaturated, and that 98% of the developers in it are probably too green to do a great job running a project, so I agree with your assessment that most companies have a terrible interview process -- and that they consider programming to be a commodity, where it should be considered some combination of an engineering discipline and a craft that requires a skilled craftsman. You wouldn't hire an artist whose entire portfolio consisted of collages of magazine photos, and yet companies are hiring programmers who literally can barely get beyond cut-and-paste coding. And you certainly wouldn't hire an unlicensed builder to create a skyscraper -- which is why we have so many companies' backends falling down like a house of cards the moment they get any traction.