Remember that it's much simpler to find a job when you already have one. The theory being that if you have no job, you might not be worth hiring. Moreover, say

Remember that it's much simpler to find a job when you already have one. The theory being that if you have no job, you might not be worth hiring. Moreover, say you're over 30, have been working for a Perl shop for a while, and the market only has Rails and Node.JS offers, you'll need to learn, publish stuff on Github, and write a couple blog posts to be barely make it to the eyes of recruiters. Add to this that unless you were lucky enough not to work on CRUD apps all day, you will have to brush up a bit on algorithms and data structures, because everyone and his dog modeled their interview process on the one Google has. Now you can start to interview. I remind you that more and more companies also cargo cult the time Google takes to select candidates, because everyone wants the "top 1%", so you might want to prepare for a bunch of interviews. Count a couple months for the whole thing, double this if you are not in (or can't move to) a hot spot or if you're over 40. 6 months is not unnecessarily careful, unless you're a rockstar (in which case 6 months of emergency funds represent about only 2 months of your salary), or very connected person, that's probably just what's needed. I do know that not all companies work this way, but if we compare the average developer salaries to the amount of cash necessary to build a 6 months emergency fund, I believe this advice is sane to give to people in general.