u/Physical_Score2697

I know this is a minor festival grievance, but something weird happened at Taste of the Danforth that left a bad taste in my mouth.

I waited in line for quite a while at the Allstate booth to join in on the festival wheel spin. When I finally reached the front, the staff asked if I was already an Allstate customer. I proudly said yes, thinking loyalty was a good thing, only to be turned away on the spot. They told me the wheel was strictly for "new prospective leads interested in a quote."

I totally get that companies use these booths for lead generation, but making a paying client wait in a long line just to reject them in front of a crowd feels like terrible event etiquette. There weren't even signs posted saying "New Prospects Only."

Is this standard practice now for street fest vendors, or did I just run into an overly strict booth crew?

I currently work at one of the major semiconductor companies (AMD/Intel) as a Validation Engineer focused on enabling machine learning workloads on Windows and Linux. Most of my work is post-silicon validation and platform enablement.

Recently, I was approached by an AI hardware company and received an offer for an ML Software Engineer position. The role is still largely post-silicon validation, but it is much more software-focused and involves working with large-scale AI infrastructure, supercomputing clusters, model integration, and related tooling.

Current compensation (~$240k/year):
$120k base
~$120k RSUs annually (these RSUs were originally 30-40k/yr. It increased considerably in this AI super cycle)

I am also expecting a promotion this month, which would likely increase total compensation by roughly $30k/year.

New offer (~$300k first year):
$170k base
~$120k RSUs annually
$10k signing bonus

The compensation increase is attractive, but I'm more interested in the career implications than the money itself.

I've wanted to move into a software-oriented role for quite some time, and this opportunity seems like a potential path in that direction. However, the work appears to be more focused on software quality, infrastructure, and model integration rather than core ML research or model development. My background has primarily been on the hardware/platform side.

Another consideration is company stability. The new employer is a relatively young AI company that recently joined the S&P 500, which feels inherently less stable than a large, established semiconductor company such as AMD or Intel.
Given those factors, would you make the switch? Is the opportunity to gain AI infrastructure and software engineering experience worth the risk, or would you stay where you are and continue building experience within a more established semiconductor company?

The Ticketmaster website says it is allowing resale above face value still??