If you are 35+ and technically savvy you really ought to consider launching your own business online. By far the best program I've seen that takes people from newbies to online business owners is here:

www.ProjectAmericanDream.com

Full disclosure: I am an investor and know dozens of people doing the program, friends and family members. Most successfully.

Older programmers have lots of challenges. Being good has nothing to do with it. If you didn't build a network as you went through your career you are going to have a hard time at 50+. Age discrimintion is very real in certain circles. An then there's the ridiculous process through which some choose to evaluate or filter people.

I have never been a freelance programmer, always an entrepreneur so I never experienced this first hand. That said, I've always had good relationships with recruiters because of my need to hire engineers for my businesses. I often get to hear war stories over a cup of coffee.

If I had to summarize what seems to bother me the most and strike me as most unfair is what I call the search for the instant language x and framework y programmer. It seems there are companies who only care about an instant and immediate fit with the language and tools they are using rather than to search for unique experienced talent and new thinking. A software engineer with decades of experience and a solid foundation in Computer Science has gone through several language/tools/frameworks transitions. Their value goes far beyond being able to write fizzbuzz in a certain language in 15 minutes. That's myopic and really juvenile in my opinion. No, these people can offer strategy, structure, safety, planning, ideas, process and a whole host of other valuable contibutions to an organization and yet they might fail a language x and framework y interview test. Once hired they can learn the desired language/framework very quickly yet there seem to be lots of examples of people not getting past that firewall due to, again, in my opinion, misplaced priorities in the hiring process.

Some of the best people I have hired knew absolutely nothing about the tools and frameworks we were using. Because I never look to fit people into a little box that has never been an issue with the way I hire at all. If someone is really good and can bring solid value to the organization I gladly spend several thousand dollars sending them to courses to get them up to speed. Inside of a month you have someone with amazing value who can now jump in and rock with the tools you happen to be using.

One example I can offer that isn't direcly related to CS is when I hired a machinist to help run our CNC shop stocked with the latest Haas CNC machines. He had NEVER run a CNC machine. Didn't even know the first thing about G-code. He had 40 years of machining experience. He blew me away when he showed me a whole bunch of little machinist utilities he wrote for his HP-41 calculator. I hired him on the spot. I probably invested about $10K in various classes getting him up to speed on CNC. This guy was AMAZING we learned a ton from him, for some of us lessons that will stay with us the rest of our lives. A mentor in the true sense of the word.

So, yeah, at some level I think hiring, in certain segments of the industry, is broken.