By
Darya Rudz
October 19th, 2023
Notably, more than a third of the current 3,000 GitHub employees joined the company during the previous 12 months. That was partially due to the rapid growth of GitHub in India.
GitHub, a for-profit company that offers a cloud-based Git repository hosting service, has been the latest tech firm to conduct a round of layoffs. Through the end of its fiscal year, GitHub will lay off 10% of its 3,000-employee team. In addition, the company is planning to go to a fully remote working regime to reduce office space and keep a hiring pause announced on January 18.
“We announced a number of difficult but necessary decisions and budgetary realignments to both protect the health of our business in the short term and grant us the capacity to invest in our long-term strategy moving forward. You can view our CEO’s full message to employees with additional details on these changes below,” wrote the company.
According to GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, such a decision is necessary to maintain the sustainable growth of the company. There will also be other internal changes in order to “protect the short-term health” of GitHub’s business.
In an email to employees, Thomas Dohmke stated:
“Although our entire leadership team has carefully deliberated this step and come to agreement, ultimately, as CEO the decision is mine. I recognize this will be difficult on you all, and we will approach this period with the utmost respect for every Hubber.”
Speaking on moving to remote work, GitHub will use only Microsoft Teams for its video conferencing needs. Dohmke explained:
“One of our decisions is to move toward a fully remote GitHub. We are seeing very low utilization rates in our offices around the world, and this decision is a testament to the success of our long-standing remote-first culture.”
Those affected are entitled to transition compensation and COBRA/COBRA equivalent as well as career transitions services assistance benefits.
Notably, more than a third of the current 3,000 GitHub employees joined the company during the previous 12 months. That was partially due to a rapid growth of GitHub in India. With more than 10 million developers in India using the platform as of November 2022, India became the second largest developer community on GitHub, behind the US.
Tech Layoffs 2023
More and more tech companies continue to cut their spending by reducing the headcount, as the incredible growth generated by the pandemic is over and now its time to face the consequences. Among the key factors leading to recession ferars are continuing supply chain issues, inflation, and the war in Ukraine.
Below are just a few companies that decided to lay off employees in 2023 so far, in addition to GitHub:
- Alphabet Inc (NYSE: GOOGL) announced a 12,000 workers layoff, around 6% of its global workforce.
- Tech giant Yahoo is cutting one fifth of its workforce, or 1,600 employees, in a major restructuring plan.
- Zoom Video Communications (NASDAQ: ZM) will lay off as many as 1,300 employees, or 15% of its total workforce.
- Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT) will lay off as many as 11,000 employees within its cost-cutting initiative.
- Salesforce Inc (NYSE: CRM) revealed plans to cut 10% of its workforce, or 8,000 employees.
Since the beginning of 2023, as many as 334 tech companies laid off nearly 102,000 workers. If this trend continues, the industry could cut more than 900,000 jobs in 2023, which is nearly six times more than the total for the industry in 2022.