Join the club. I was laid off, along with my team of developers and own my boss, when the company I worked for moved software R&D to France (their home base). They decided it was more cost efficient to have two junior programmers in France supervise a team of 35 Russians, many with PhD's, who they were getting for $7.00/hour US. So, they took all our code, which was a completely new system (and very large) written in C++, using COM, SQL Server, TCP/IP, etc., gave it to the Russians and laid us all off. This was in mid-July. So, last week I received an e-mail from France (as if I would respond) asking where they might find the documentation. Gee, if you weren't so greedy you would have given us time to write the documentation before you fired us all, you bloody Frenchmen. Last I heard they were still having problems understanding the system and couldn't even set up a build environment to compile it. ha ha Screw them!
My boss said the hell with it -- he's not looking for employment. He's in his late 50's, has almost 40 years software development experience, so he's ready to take a rest. I have 15 years experience, as of late doing R&D and working as a project lead software engineer. Most of the stuff I did was COM/DCOM and TCP/IP protocol development in C++, with a lot of server development (app servers using SQL Server for the RDMS). Lot's of multi-threaded back-end, which I've always enjoyed doing.
Right now I have a small contract with a local university, so I'm not starving yet.
One thing I noticed, and perhaps you guys may have noticed it as well, but the guys I've spoke to said they are not firing H1-B VISA engineers, just the Americans. Have any of you noticed that as well?
Anyway, don't worry Bubbles. You have a valuable skill set so you'll find something. My older brother has a BS in accounting and an MCSE, and he's struggling to find help desk. That area is saturated.
Also, pay attention to your severance agreement. Mine had a very restrictive non-compete (I designed most of their high visibility products so they worry about me going to the competition), so I had to pay a lawyer to get a better deal. It cost me over $1,000, but now I am free to screw them any way I like.