I'm under 30 and I've had the same experience. Every place I've applied to felt like they had a checklist of hundreds of items and a no on any of them was an instant disqualification. Even at places where I had a friend recommend me and could find out their reason for not giving me an offer, there was no consistent reason and it was usually just one person saying no so their team sat for 6-12 months looking for people.

It's like every business is now completely terrified by a wrong hire and will only take the "perfect candidate" but at market rate

This has been my experience as well; It's as if every company is looking for a unicorn programmer... when their domain isn't any more or less unique than any other domain.

One of the "interesting" side effects is that it seems like interviewers are starting with the assumption that the person interviewing is an idiot who knows nothing and then works from there. So any slight misstep or misremembering of something puts you the fail box immediately.

My theory is that part of this is the broken culture of interviewing that we have as an industry. This "tricky CS puzzle" crap that originated at GOOG and MSFT is so prevalent that it's nigh impossible to actually succeed. More than once, it's obvious to me that the people DOING the interviewing couldn't pass their own interview...

Exactly, my favorite flavor of those are the ones where the interviewer appears to not stop until they find what you cannot solve, which is perfectly fine for an interview, but they still seem to treat that failure as an inability to program. One place I interviewed at wasn't doing much more than crud, and we got into our 4th cs question of that day, and my 6th with the company so far after their phone screen. They gave me some question that was solved with a flood fill. I admitted I had never encountered that before and muddled through it getting an answer that could not handle a few edge cases which I pointed out before they even brought it up. After that point they cut that phase of the interview short and the next guy asked me some things that were answered off my resume and they said they'd call me back which of course they didnt.

I could easily have been denied for other reasons but it's one of numerous interviews where I go through 1-n cs questions and whenever I get to the first one I can't solve the interview is cut short. It's just a giant waste of everyone's time

Ugh. I have a pretty decent job, and about 20 years of experience, so I have no need to job hunt. But if/when I do, I fully intend to adopt the policy that I will get up and walk out of interviews that do whiteboard coding puzzle tests. Having been trained to conduct such interviews at Google, I have no desire to participate in them. I can see their use for large companies like Google or Amazon that get thousands of resumes a day and can afford the false negatives if it means fewer false positives. But I can't see their utility at all for small companies hungry for good talent.

True. And it doesn't make sense given "at will" contracts everywhere.

Lie on LinkedIn about knowing Python after doing one simple Django project 1). Watch the desperate recruiters fill your inbox.

1) actually I didn't lie, people I knew just kept +1'ing Python on my LinkedIn profile because I talked about it sometimes while I was doing a one off project in Python

If you're capable of picking up new technologies and languages with ease, then why don't you?

For example, learning a new programming language every year for fun is a decent exercise that makes you better with your "current work tool" as well, keeps your tech stack perpetually up to speed, and isn't that hard - the second language takes significant time, the 15th (for 15+ years of professional experience) brings lots of things you've already seen, so you can do something useful on the first day and a reasonable project in the first week.

Because it would be nigh impossible to learn every tech/language for every job you are considering interviewing for.

Would you spend a week learning a new tech stack for an upcoming interview, with the knowledge that they might not hire you? Only to restart the learning process again next week when you interview at another shop?

You don't need to learn every tech/language that the interviewers want, you need to learn a language that the interviewers want. If you have learned 5 languages in the last 5 years, at least one or two (unless you've been really weird in selecting them) would be fresh and popular, and there would be a bunch of different employers that are recruiting for one of those 5 languages.

The big problem is putting all your eggs in one basket, which is bad if that one technology goes out of demand (as the grandparent painfully experienced). It's not something you do for hiring in a week before interview, it's something you do all the time in the years before as a part of your natural interest and "sharpening the saw" - if you spend the last 5 years working with technology A, a person who is "capable of picking up new technologies and languages with ease" would have picked up technologies B, C, D and E during that time anyway, and can go out to employers who want B truthfully claiming that they learned B back in 2015.