Answer: "Working somewhere else mostly, but some started their own company."
https://www.wired.com/story/tech-layoffs-are-feeding-a-new-s...
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."
I think SV is a joke compared to what it was, but it's still easier to do a startup thing there than anywhere.
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)
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 know a lot of these people, many are just now starting up their job search, if at all.