jacksons5f

I recently saw the job posting in Finland (Suunto, I believe) that had diving experience as an imperative requirement for an embedded software engineer role. I've applied and never heard back. HR contact that they posted also never replied. The job was closed a couple weeks after. I never even got a rejection email.

So yeah, everyone do that, that's kind of the de facto way of hiring specific people when there is a requirement to post jobs. That doesn't make it ok though.

Nope, that is a custom SoC that had SiFive RISC-V cores from the times when they still did embedded stuff.

100% agree. Is it ideal? Nah. Can you launch successful products with it with only a moderate amount of headache? Yep!

Heart of our system that powers a household name devices is a RISC-V multi-hart SoC. It does quite a bit - a little bit of compute, a little bit of DSP. Definitely not the best fit, but cheap and works well enough. The buggest gap for us was the lack of the decent debugging featurea like ARM's Data Watchpoint Traces - but maybe there is an extension for that already?

Well, that one is likely out of danger - so far PSRAM (I assume that's what you have) is not impacted that much. However, we had to cancel some projects because we couldn't secure enough chips which have DDR on die at a reasonable price. They are 4x now compared to December last year.