A profile of Roger Lee, who runs Layoffs.fyi that has catalogued ~450,000 tech job cuts and Comprehensive.io that tracks compensation in tech job postings
Roger Lee has cataloged hundreds of thousands of tech job cuts on his site Layoffs.fyi. He still believes the industry will “100 percent” bounce back. Tweets: @loracorkelley , @pkafka , @bmorrissey , @emmabgo , @jordynjournals , and @dealbook Tweets: Lora Kelley / @loracorkelley : Roger Lee believes in tech. That's why he has manually cataloged some 450,000 job cuts in the sector on his website https://layoffs.fyi/. My profile for @nytimes! https://www.nytimes.com/... Peter Kafka / @pkafka : This is a story about a guy who tracks tech layoffs and it never mentions Fucked Company or @DistroKid. And I'm now a guy who tweets about 20-year-old websites. Sad! https://www.nytimes.com/... Brian Morrissey / @bmorrissey : A new Phillip Kaplan emerges https://www.nytimes.com/... Emma Goldberg / @emmabgo : There's been a push for more transparency, and less stigma, in talking about layoffs across tech — and https://layoffs.fyi/ has been an important part of that. This is a great profile by @loracorkelley of its founder https://www.nytimes.com/... Jordyn / @jordynjournals : https://layoffs.fyi/ has become such an essential data set that it's shocking to be reminded that it's only been around for three years. Great profile by @loracorkelley on the founder of this go-to site https://www.nytimes.com/... @dealbook : Roger Lee is the creator of https://layoffs.fyi/, a website that has been tracking tech layoffs for the past three years. The site has become a meaningful data source for media groups and recruiters. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Roger Lee runs two of the few public ledgers of the tech downturn by hand: Layoffs.fyi, which has catalogued roughly 450,000 job cuts, and Comprehensive.io, which tracks what tech job postings actually pay. His work sits on a lineage Peter Kafka flagged — the dot-com-era tracker Fucked Company — but operates at a scale and cadence the industry's own reporting never matched.
The ledger kept filling after the profile ran: over 50,000 more workers were cut from 200-plus companies in early 2024 alone, even as the broader market showed the paradox Lee is documenting — tech occupations had just hit record employment of 6.39M even as headline cuts mounted.
First-order effects
- Lee's sites become the de facto scoreboard journalists and laid-off workers cite, since no company or government agency publishes comparable running totals of sector-wide cuts and posted-pay trends.
- Laid-off workers get a real-time map of who is cutting and what replacement roles pay, at the same moment experienced candidates are reporting that re-entry into tech jobs is harder than seniority suggests.
Second-order effects
- Companies announcing cuts now do so knowing each round will be tallied publicly within days, adding reputational cost to layoffs that once passed with little aggregation.
- Comprehensive.io's posting-level compensation data gives job seekers leverage in negotiations, pressuring employers whose offers lag what comparable listings show.
Third-order effects
- If one-person trackers keep outpacing official labor statistics on speed and granularity, workforce transparency in tech consolidates around independently run dashboards rather than institutions.
- A sustained divergence between record tech employment and continuous mass cuts points toward an industry restructuring around fewer, differently skilled roles — the outcome Lee himself bets against with his '100 percent' rebound call, which remains unproven either way.
The trend: Tech's labor downturn is being measured in public by independent trackers faster than any institution can, turning layoff counts into shared infrastructure for workers, press, and employers alike.