Layoffs and hires, Nov 2026
Companies are cutting and hiring in the same week. If you're a solo developer, the hiring side tells you who to sell to.
Every week there's a new layoff headline, and if you write code for a living it's easy to read that as "tech is shrinking, get out." I don't believe that's the useful read, especially if you're building on your own.
I went through Layoffs & Hires, a site that tracks layoffs and new job openings at companies around the world. What it shows is that work is moving, not disappearing. For a solo developer, that's a map of who has money and problems right now.
The short version
- This week the site logged about 13 new job ads for every reported layoff.
- The cuts are in manufacturing, airlines, software, energy and big consumer brands, while the hiring is in healthcare, retail, aerospace, auto parts and logistics.
- If you're a solo developer, that second group is who you should be selling to. The rest of this post is about which of their problems are worth going after.
The numbers
In the last 7 days the site counted 7,095 layoffs and 93,405 new job openings. (Checked November 10, 2026. Both are rolling 7-day numbers, so they change as the site updates.)
Who's cutting
The biggest layoffs this week:
- Boeing: about 2,500. Boeing said it's cutting roughly 5% of its commercial airplane workforce, partly through attrition. 2,500 is the estimate based on that division's headcount.
- Canva: 1,271 roles affected. That includes people being moved or relocated, so not all of them are losing their jobs.
- PepsiCo: around 1,000 in North America, per the Wall Street Journal.
- KLM: about 1,000.
- Qantas: 850 corporate roles being outsourced to Accenture, mostly in India, starting mid-2027.
- Woodside Energy: 500+, about 10% of its workforce.
Google, ServiceNow, BMW, UBS and Tripadvisor are on the list too, along with a handful of smaller names.
Who's hiring
I took the 20 companies with the most new postings and grouped them by industry:
| Industry | New openings | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Retail | 5,199 | Walmart, Circle K |
| Healthcare | 4,124 | Fresenius, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Abbott, AstraZeneca, Intermountain |
| Aerospace and defense | 1,382 | Thales, Airbus |
| Auto parts | 1,366 | Advance Auto Parts, Genuine Parts Company |
| Tech and security | 1,281 | HPE, Palo Alto Networks |
| Finance and insurance | 1,266 | Citi, Marsh |
| Property and facilities | 1,107 | JLL |
| Hospitality | 494 | Four Seasons |
| Industrial tech | 476 | Hitachi |
| Logistics | 474 | UPS |
Walmart alone posted 3,301. Healthcare is the one that stands out most to me, though. Six of the top 20 are healthcare companies.
What I'd do with this as a solo developer
Sell to the industries that are hiring. A business that's hiring is growing, has budget, and has problems it needs solved this month. You're most likely not going to sell to Walmart. But every one of these industries has thousands of smaller businesses in it: clinics, auto parts shops, property managers, franchise owners, local logistics companies. If the big players are hiring, I would assume the smaller ones are feeling the same demand.
Build around the pain of growing. When a business is hiring, the same problems show up every time. Scheduling, onboarding, training, paperwork, compliance, keeping track of who's doing what. Those are boring problems, and boring problems are the ones people pay for. I looked into which ones are actually worth going after in the next section.
Look at the layoff side for a different reason. When a company cuts people, the work those people did doesn't always go away. Someone still has to do it with a smaller team. That's where automation and small, focused tools can earn their keep. I'd be careful selling to companies that are cutting budgets, though. Sell the outcome, not another subscription.
If you're picking a skill, pick security or infrastructure. HPE and Palo Alto Networks are both hiring hundreds while Google, Canva and ServiceNow are cutting. That's two companies, so I wouldn't overread it. But it lines up with where I'd put my learning time anyway, and it's a skill you can sell to small businesses that can't afford a security team.
Don't build another general app. None of this points to "build a better to-do list." It points to picking one industry and one painful job inside it.
Five problems, one pick
These are the problems I think a solo developer can actually win. They all have three things in common. The person with the problem can say yes without a procurement team. They're reachable by cold email. And the big software companies either don't serve them or charge too much for a small business.
I started with five ideas and looked at who's already selling into each one. Competition by itself isn't bad. It means people already pay. What I'm looking for is a gap: incumbents priced for big companies, with small operators left on email and spreadsheets. Three of the five have that gap. Two don't.
My pick: contractor insurance certificates for property managers
Property managers have to collect a certificate of insurance from every plumber, electrician and cleaner who works on their buildings. Those certificates expire, and chasing them is a lot of back and forth over email. Build something that collects them, reads the expiration date, and chases the vendor automatically.
Here's why it's my pick. The established tools (myCOI, Jones, BCS) mostly don't publish prices, and one estimate puts myCOI at roughly $5,000 to $10,000 a year. That's a lot for a company managing a few dozen buildings. The pain is real too. If an uninsured contractor gets hurt on site, it's the property manager's problem. And reading a certificate and pulling out the dates is exactly the kind of thing AI made cheap to build.
The buyer is the owner or operations lead at a small property management company. To be fair, BCS advertises a free tier for up to 25 vendors, so you'd need to be better at the chasing part, not just the storing part.
Runner-up: licenses and certifications that expire
This market is split in two. On the high end, Certemy starts around $10,000 a year. On the low end there are a lot of small tools, like RenewalTracker from $49 and CredTally with a free tier. So the generic "remind me before it expires" app already exists and it's cheap.
What's still worth building is the version for one industry. Clinics track nursing licenses and CPR cards. Trucking companies track CDLs. Facilities companies track forklift certs and safety training. When one lapses, they can't bill for that person's work or they fail an inspection. If you know exactly which licenses matter in, say, dialysis clinics and which state boards to check, you're not competing with a $49 reminder app anymore.
Worth it if you pick a niche: applicants who go cold
Only 19% of job seekers hear back within 24 hours of applying, according to a survey of 1,000+ US candidates. Slow response was the top reason they lost interest. Now picture a clinic or auto parts store that's hiring every month and the manager is also running the floor. A tool that texts every applicant within minutes, screens them, and books the interview fixes that.
The catch is that this space is crowded. Workstream, Fountain, Hireology and HigherMe all sell hourly hiring, and HigherMe is listed from about $89 per location a month. That also tells you owners already pay per location for this. I'd only do it for an industry those tools ignore.
Two to skip
Shift call-outs. I liked this one until I looked. When I Work, Homebase and Connecteam already let staff claim open shifts, and they're cheap. Capterra lists When I Work from $2.50 per user and Connecteam from $29 flat a month. Hard to beat as a solo developer.
New hire training. Same story. Connecteam has a free plan for up to 10 users, and Trainual covers the documentation side. Small businesses already have cheap options here.
Who not to sell to
Anything where you're selling to Walmart, a hospital system or Citi. They have security reviews and procurement processes that take months, and they don't buy from one person. I'd also avoid anything that touches patient medical records, payroll or taxes as a first product. The compliance work is real and it'll slow you down before you've made a dollar.
Finding the first customers
Pick one industry and one problem from above. If you can't decide, pick insurance certificates for property managers. Then:
- Build the list from Google Maps, franchise disclosure documents (Item 20 lists every franchisee with contact info) and state license lookups.
- Email the owner or office manager, not "the company." In a business this size, they're the one with the problem and the one who pays.
- Ask, don't pitch. Something like "How do you keep track of when your staff's licenses expire?" If the answer is a spreadsheet and a groan, that's your customer.
Again, do it by hand first. Before writing much code, offer to handle it for a few of them. You'll learn what actually breaks, and you'll be getting paid while you learn.
The fine print
I'll be honest, this data has limits.
- It only counts layoffs that hit the news (about 100+ people, reported by two outlets or one major one) and US WARN notices (50+ people at one site). Most layoffs never get announced.
- The weekly layoff total only adds up entries that have a number. Google, BMW, Tripadvisor and a few others are listed with no count, so the real number is higher.
- Some of the counts are estimates or "affected" numbers, like Boeing and Canva above.
- "New openings" means job ads on company career pages, first posted in the last 7 days and still open. It doesn't mean 93,405 people got hired.
- It doesn't show job descriptions, so it can't tell you which roles are being cut or filled.
- By the site's own description, the companies it tracks lean toward tech and the US.
So take the exact numbers loosely. The direction is the useful part.
What I want to look at next
My thing is that "which companies are hiring" is only half the answer. The better question is which jobs are gaining demand and which are losing it. For example:
- Software engineers vs. AI engineers
- Administrative assistants vs. operations specialists
- Traditional customer support vs. AI-assisted customer operations
- General marketing vs. performance marketing
- Traditional IT vs. cybersecurity and cloud
This site doesn't track that, and the gap is a product idea in itself. Pull job postings, read the titles and descriptions, and show which roles are growing. That would tell you whether a company is just trimming for a quarter or whether the work itself is changing. And it would show where the money is going over the next 3 to 5 years, which is what I actually care about.