Hacker Trends › “layoffs” trend
“Layoffs” was mentioned 34,579 times on Hacker News between 2007 and 2026, peaking in Jan 2023 with 2,471 that month.
Every month from 2007 to 2026, counting how often “layoffs” appears in Hacker News stories and comments. Each point is a live date-histogram over ~45M items, computed with Upstash Redis Search.
Layoffs has been discussed since 2007 and totals 34,579 lifetime mentions, rising during downturns. The curve peaks in January 2023 with 2,471 mentions, during the wave of large tech layoffs that included Twitter and Coinbase.
Recent top threads broadened the framing toward causes and aftermath: the Section 174 tax-code change blamed for fueling cuts, a personal account of how a layoff changed one’s view of work, and a developer who built a Steam hit after being laid off from Meta. The topic stayed active through 2026.
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