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Designpreneurship

💔 Got Let Go - tracking layoffs in tech companies [2016]

Oct 8, 2022

Problem

I started noticing more and more headlines about startups’ layoffs. It was hard to see the real situation, so I wanted to understand if it was an alarming trend or just too much buzz in the media.

Solution

A website collecting (and displaying) information about layoffs, grouped by month, number of employees fired by the company, and source URL. Visually displaying a timeline graph of the volumes.

Status: Archived

After initial scooping through the articles and announcements, which I did myself, I wanted to see if anybody was interested to contribute to the data collection and opened a communication channel where people could submit their layoff information. Hardly anyone contributed and it was too time-consuming to keep doing it manually myself.

Learnings

Layoff data is not important enough for people to contribute to (even anonymously).
Startups are not obliged to report their layoffs, which makes it almost impossible to get real data.
Various sources communicate different numbers for the same layoff, which makes it more time-consuming to aggregate the data from various different websites.