There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

Along the same lines of missing good junior engineers at work, we occasionally interview stellar engineers that’ve inflated their resume a bit to get an interview, but we end up rejecting them for not having all the specific experiences our manager wants them to have even though they’re generally great and could clearly upskill where necessary. No wonder we can’t grow the team when we’re out here looking for unicorns

Employers need to get back to expecting to have to train new employees. This used to be pretty common. My first two employers after college hired a lot of people with no programming experience into programming roles. They just looked for smart people who were willing to learn, and they taught them to program.