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”.