With a company like Yahoo, you can bet their programmers learned a lot about coding, maintaining, user/management expectations, and internal politics. While losing your job sucks, those skills transition very well anywhere you go. If you're a bad programmer and you didn't learn how to be a better programmer at Yahoo, you're going to be in a world of hurt. If you were at least decent and learned what you could, you might be in a better position to negotiate with a new company, or, like you said, start your own project.

Out-of-work programmers are only at a disadvantage (respective to other industries) if their true title would be more like "COBOL coder". A semi truck driver only struggles to find work if he drove nothing but an automatic for his whole life.