I seriously doubt that. Might be true for younger people who were laid off by the "LIFO rule" (i.e., cheaper severance), but anyone with a 10y+ career would at least think twice before joining a startup... Especially in Europe, but these kinds of stories are never about Europe.

What, if you were laid off with 10+ years of savings from a bigtech salary and 30-40 weeks of severance and continuing benefits, you wouldn't (after a few weeks to process and recover) begin hammering out a prototype to that idea that's been in the back of your head for the last 5-10 years? You could burn half a year and still have ten weeks to do a job search.

You assume too much regarding parting terms, and I don't see any mention of family responsibilities in that rosy scenario of yours.

Those are the terms from Google's announcement: https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/inside-google/messa...

10 years gives you 36 weeks of severance, plus 6 months of healthcare.

If you have a family, you're never going to have a better opportunity to spend several months working on your side project without measurably impacting your family's stability.

Plus, when you do need to resume your job search, your resume is now "I spent ten years doing these things at BigCo using their proprietary tooling, plus here's the demo of the thing I tried to startup the last six months using off the shelf frameworks, which I am now already proficient in."

Those are the US terms. There is an entire planet beyond, you know.

Most startup founders are over 40.

And independently wealthy to a degree.

> Especially in Europe, but these kinds of stories are never about Europe

I think SV is a joke compared to what it was, but it's still easier to do a startup thing there than anywhere.

I saw a quote (I think from HackerNews) talking about how during good times, there’s lots of startups getting money. In tough times, there’s lots of money going to a handful of good startups. Just work hard to find yourself a promising startup!

One word: Europe.

Little money to any startup.

That’s fair. While there’s obviously a limited number of positions, how hard is it to get a remote job with an American company? My American company currently employs one guy from Europe, but I’m not sure how common that actually is.

Most US companies can’t handle the tax or the processes - only multinationals can do it “properly”.

the next wave of innovation will be things like battery tech, deep AI

in other words, nothing a React dev is going to put together in their kitchen

realistically, the unemployed will end up competing with the ten of thousands of new devs coming out of college and bootcamps...the guy who cleans our pool is learning python as part of his online coding degree (really)

1. It’s not zero sum 2. You don’t need to innovate like that to create a successful startup 3. There is a very, very aggressive skill curve for developers and being ex-Google will have an advantage over the pool boy

It's great your pool guy is furthering his education and going into tech but there is a skill gap between experienced ex-FAANG and those jumping into software for the pay check. Bootcamp/College grads are not competing at the same level as those who have 5+ years of good experience and a passion for tech (as most of us have, being on HN on a Friday evening/workday).

And make long rants about how they only make $200k/year.

Poolboy will be happy to make anything significantly higher than what they make cleaning pools and won’t know about the good old days when you could call up the on staff chef and have food delivered to your cubicle. He’d be like “what’s a cubicle?”

I wouldn't bet on it. Innovation takes hard work, sacrifice, low pay, etc. - exactly the opposite of what one does in big tech. They might try out of hubris until they burn through that nest egg and retreat.