As someone who spent five years in Facebook doing hardware after an acquisition, my advice is to save enough to be comfortable and then apply your passion and knowledge to a startup doing something you believe is worthwhile. Worst case if it fails, you get to move the needle a bit in a space, make useful connections, learn a bunch, and then bounce back to a FAANG job.
Expensive only means anything if you are not made of money: these megacorps are literally made of money. What's $1.4B to keep down a possible competitor? To keep down someone who may have made their chips generally usable? Who may have upstreamed support?
It's just unsatisfying to the world to have absolutely no new evidence, no points of data, no benchmarks in capitalism, no way to figure out what to expect of product, when interesting companies are acquihired & their efforts to do good pulled into the spider web of megacorp-ism. The world literally learns nor understands nothing, after Nuvia got bought. Whatever comes out will be a synthetic other. Similar to so many other acquisitions. The backing of the larger company changes the effort itself, & diminishes the competitiveness of the offering.
And the intent to support the thing well, the desire to form a solid community: dead. The new corporate largess defines the environment for whatever might ship. There will be no radical new upstreamings, new mainlinings. It will be business as usual, alas, most probably: closed, highly proprietary vendor drops. An anti-free anti-accessible system of chipmaking, unsupportability-writ-large, re-asserting itself, over what might have been.
It seemed the world might get a sip of that sweet ambrosia, but now we all sip again as we are permitted from the great leadened chalices. Nothing new will be offered.
Anti-trust now (and yesterday too). I can not believe that the DoJ ended the anti-trust suit against Qualcomm[1][2]. This is such capitol evidence about how shitty chip-making is: everyone of potential value gets immediately snatched by a colossus. This system is poisoned. Why are the regulators doing nothing? Why is there no back-pressure against this system of everyone being acquired? Nothing new is ever permitted. Everything is hideously broken.
- someone who worked at a semiconductor startup