Nate Schmoll

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Job market complexities

Laid off #

I joined Block in January. Unfortunately, just one month later Jack decided to lay off almost half the company, and I was one of them.

The severance package was decent, but it was still disappointing. The new role was great and so were my team members. I had other offers in December, but chose to bet on Block instead. I guess we all make bad bets on occasion.

The job search since then has been tougher than I anticipated. When nobody is hiring, even strong networks and warm intros can only help so much. This is easily the roughest market I’ve seen for SysEng, InfraEng, SRE, ProdEng, and DevOps roles. I believe things will improve in the long term, but right now many leadership teams seem convinced they can achieve significantly more with far fewer people than reality will allow.

What has surprised me most is how narrowly targeted many of the open roles are. I’ve always seen myself as a deep generalist – broad knowledge across the stack, with the ability to go deep quickly in any area. I connect dots between infrastructure, applications, and everything in between, and I can ramp up on new knowledge domains in a very short period of time.

AI and the future #

AI has undeniably been a force multiplier in the kind of work I do. The tooling helps me move faster, explore more ideas, and automate the tedious parts. But systems don’t architect themselves. There will always be a need for people who can reason through complex trade-offs, design coherent architectures, and own outcomes end-to-end. That’s why I’ve decided to stay in this market. I genuinely love building systems, solving hard problems, and continuously learning.

In the meantime, I’ve been pouring my energy into Outcron. It’s been a lot of fun and has given me the chance to push my AI tooling skills further while exploring some lesser-known coding and ops harnesses.

Need expertise? #

If you’re looking to fill a full-time role in the areas of SysEng, InfraEng, SRE, ProdEng, and/or DevOps, please consider getting in touch with me. My resume is available here.

Cheers!

~Nate