I was assigned to a contract in San Diego AFTER I had moved to Pocatello. My company didn't cover the travel costs. It's not fun to suck up 8 months of travel costs and thousands of miles of wear and tear on my personal vehicle. I was covering work for 4 Java programmers, 3 C++ programmers and a EE. Average billed time was 250 hours/month at $256/hour. My company was reaping a windfall and using the money to cover a room full of people for whom there was no work.
The contract company was a startup and it folded up shop in June 2002. Less than a week later, my "boss" sent me a layoff notice. Seems he was sitting on his ass doing nothing with all the money I was earning for him. No marketing. No effort to find the next bit of work. He laid off all the other non-producers too.
I had 480 hours of vacation on the books. I was allowed two week grace before termination...or I could consume my vacation in 40 increments to remain on the payroll. I chose the latter. I did my own marketing. First, I tracked down immediate work to port some weather analysis software from SUN Solaris to Linux. That put me back into a "covered" mode and out of "layoff" mode. I then found $3 million in new work in Detroit. My old boss wanted a piece of that action. I told him to "stuff it" and took the work to a trustworthy manager in Dayton, Ohio.
That was my first layoff ever. I decided that I needed to get out from under my mortgage. I put 4,000 shares on the table to cover the mortgage, pay off both cars and zero my credit card. Damn if the company didn't stop the sale for first time in its 33 year history. The share price was lowered from $33 to $28. I just lost $20,000 overnight. I decided I still needed to pay off the mortgage. The cars and credit cards would have to wait. I sold 4100 shares and paid off my main residence. Except for $3,400 per year in taxes, I'm pretty well set for a place to live.
Today I have more work than I have time to do it. I work 70+ hours per week on embedded systems design and implementation. I also have signal processing tasks on another project. Finding time to mow the lawn is sometimes challenging.
Great job of taking responsibility for yourself. I'm being called arrogant, and getting ripped to shreds, because I worked two jobs to be sure to save enough to be able to retire - or at least work whatever job I want (similar line of work as yours - EE with embedded systems design and coding - DSP processing for NASA, etc.)
You just have to keep going at it...
Anyway, good for you that you're OK now.