I've had a similar time trying to hire an ML developer with any experience. What I suspect the market has gotten tougher, but not uniformly. If it's bad for experienced people with some form of personal network, it's extra bad for those who were already terrible when the market was tight.
I also love how all the responses blame you and the company; maybe we've developed some unrealistic expectations over the past few years? I don't hear this sort of response outside of development.
Yup. Too much context to give on a HN thread, don't really care to defend it. I'm sure the process isn't perfect and I'm looking for ways to improve it, but it's certainly not an easy problem to solve.
Look for people at banks. We made our first ML Engineer hire a few months ago and almost all the candidates came from people working at banks. The salaries aren't FAANG and the talent is there. The person we hired was a former ME to boot.
I also love how all the responses blame you and the company; maybe we've developed some unrealistic expectations over the past few years? I don't hear this sort of response outside of development.