Having worked in the Midwest, I had a lot of
terrible experiences I haven't seen replicated on either coast.
There seem to be a lot of midwestern companies full of programmers, selling software products, which don't see themselves as "software companies" (like Yahoo is a "media company"). Without exception, I found that those companies were trying to buy code like it came off an assembly line - paying lots of people low wages to pump out their daily lines. Some of the "smarter" ones had realized that this offer was so unpalatable that they couldn't get existing programmers, and were shipping new hires to bootcamps to create candidates. (Cynically, I assume that they have an incentive to ensure these bootcamps teach bad, cargo-cult programming - if they were good they'd quickly lose trainees to better jobs.)
Job hunting out there, at least half the prospects I turned up had something hideously bad involved. Some mandated novice-bootcamp attendance, starting even experienced devs at "See Spot run, see Spot code". Some wanted 6 month (or 1 year!) trial periods on minimal salary or even sub-minimum stipends. Some just wanted the usual bullshit like "5 years of Java 8 experience". Many had ludicrous location requirements, like cycling through shifts in offices around the country before ending up in rural Montana. Pretty much all of it felt like commodity purchasing - I wasn't an employee, I was an agreement to deliver "six codes per week".
Moving back to the coast, and seeing a lot of self-described software companies, I have a lot more hope that people are at least trying to hire well. There are just a lot of companies which haven't gotten the message.