December 7th, I signed up for the Voluntary Reduction In Force at my company. On the 16th, I got confirmation I was accepted. The 22nd was my last day of work, tomorrow will be my last day of pay. (The company has been on shutdown/paid holiday since the 22nd. The layoff officially starts next week.)
I will receive a week of severance pay for each year I've been there (rounded down). Having been there since June 1998, this means I get 13 weeks pay. I also have a bit over 7 weeks of unused PTO coming as well.
The main reason I volunteered was that Liz may have to leave Chicago to get a job once she passes the bar exam, so I might have had to quit my job anyway.
Also, being a Windows programmer at an organization that deals mostly with embedded programming, I'm a bit of a square peg in a round hole there. It's not so much that my work isn't appreciated by those who use it or by my managers and tech leads (many were not happy to see me leave), but that my work ultimately means very little to the company as a whole. That's not meant to be an indictment of them in any way, it's just the way it is. Case in point, it happened more than once over the years I would be asked by other software engineers in a joking-and-not-meant-to-be-offensive-and-not-taken-as-offensive-but-still-endemic-of-the-overall-culture-sort-of-way when I would get around to doing some "real" programming.
This is also a company where productivity tools are valued low enough that apparently one of our in-house developed tools (which I didn't work on myself) had its codebase released to a customer under a contract without any sort of clause pertaining to that codebase being included in said contract and now apparently a version of that codebase is being sold by someone else. Granted, its an outdated version, but since my company doesn't do tools development, apparently we don't care enough about our tools intellectual property to actually protect it.
Not to mention that my manager (who I actually never worked directly for until the last six months or so, being lent out to various tech leads under specific program accounts, in spite of her being my manager for about 3 or 4 years now) has had her funding for the tools group cut to nothing for next year, thereby meaning that once again I have to charge to a specific program. Not that it's anything new, but it's another example of the corporate culture towards Windows tools development.
So since I might have had to quit my company next year anyway; I have very little debt after finally getting rid of my house (and that was the car loan I took out to cover my closing costs, which itself will soon be paid off leaving me debt free); I have no children; my girlfriend has good prospects; the software industry has been pretty good even through this weak economy; I have extensive Windows and database programming backgrounds (though, I lack Web development experience) and am well versed in multiple programming languages; and though I don't have a lot of smart-phone embedded app type experience--a significant portion of the software market these days--I learn quickly and my experience programming Windows GUIs will translate well to that; I'm pretty much at the ideal point of my life to change jobs.
So I took the plunge.