From your description, I have to wonder if it wasn't more a matter of how you were presenting your progress on things and your own estimates of accomplishments.

From your description, I have to wonder if it wasn't more a matter of how you were presenting your progress on things and your own estimates of accomplishments. People aren't really any good at understanding what other people are up to, especially if they are first time managers. It is also pretty much impossible to compare two programmers given two different tasks since we regularly are off on our estimates of everything. AFA, continuing, I would say yes, if you can handle it emotionally. It's actually quite good in many unemployment systems to have these kinds of phases and pretty hard to make as much in a lot of other roles that are easy to transition to. The stress of unemployment is substantial though. Jobs that involve programming but aren't directly programming may provide a more average level of stress, I.e. support and software maintenance roles that are more focused on customers than code.