You must interviewing only at places that are paying top rates, £700+ a day (in the UK) Places that pay average or below average like £500 a day or less. Arent so fussy because they cant easily find good talent.
You are American, right? I am not responding directly to something you said, rather, something you made me think of. If you don't mind me asking, what is this obsession with speed of coding? Is that mainly a front-end/web developer thing? I understand projects have deadlines and speed counts, but what is up with these countless videos on youtube of devs tuning VIM/editors/IDEs as if they are about to enter the Indy 500? Shouldn't a few minutes be spent selecting readable/logical variable names and the architecture of the function/method itself? My question, is writing code at the speed of a court reporter actually a thing on your team? Or is it more about "here's what's on the burn-down chart for today...just get it done..."
Im in London. But currently contract with a great US company. There is this thing about extreme work ethic. Jordan Peterson said in one of his videos that you can drop people with that kind of work ethic into the middle of a large forest. And all they would do is constantly go around chopping down trees for wood. We got two guys with extreme work ethic in our team. Another 2 guys with high work ethic (me and one other guy). One guy who works at steady healthy pace, but can up the pace when needed, and finally 1 slacker. I would be happy to work at a steady pace also. But i got two guys above me working insanely hard. So i have upped my game by 100%. Still not producing as much as them. The funny thing is the company, or at least my managers, do not push anyone at. all. That is why the slacker gets away with slacking. Its a great company to work for especially if you are contractor like i am. The contractors can work from any where in the world anytime you want. Personally i can easily output 1000 lines of quality code per week, with full test coverage. Programming isnt that hard i been doing it since 1984 and got my Computer Science degree from one the best colleges in the world. And they tought us how to program properly.
Unlikely, I pride myself in using Occam's razor on ever bit of code i write. Im always thinking how can i make this simpler without sacrificing anything else. Very few other programmers do that. Most prefer to add extra layers of indirection and complexity.
I think there is a bit of a divide between the Google/Facebook/Microsoft world and the small tech company world. Most of my developers are over 40 for two reasons. First, the top 25 year olds "discriminate" against smaller companies like mine....they all want to be able to say they work for Google. Second, the big tech companies big D discriminate against software developers over 40. So I get better people than I'd normally be able to attract because they're being actively discriminated against elsewhere and they don't "discriminate" against me. As an added bonus, it you welcome older devs, pay them we'll, and treat them we'll they're incredibly loyal so turnover rate is almost non-existent. That's worth a lot, especially at a smaller company.