[MaybiusStrip]

Let's say you manage to carve out 2-4 hours a day to work on your side project while remaining a decent person to your wife and kids. Leaving your job means you could spend 11-13 hours a day on it instead. That's an enormous difference and could easily mean the difference between failure and success.

Not only that, but you are putting yourself in precarious legal territory by bootstrapping a side project. Your employer could easily claim ownership of all your IP.

OP was a senior software engineer at AWS, how difficult do you think it would be for him to re-enter the workforce with a competing cloud provider nor even coming back to Amazon?

[DVassallo]

Exactly. And I think nearly everyone in tech is able to re-enter the workforce within < 6 months.