Stack Overflow Lays Off 28% of staff; Announce CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar to stay profitable

Question-and-answer portal for developers, ‘Stack Overflow’ will layoffs more than 140 employees. The announcement has been made today (October 17, 2023) that ‘Stack Overflow’ will be reduced and the workforce is to be replaced as the company is moving ahead with the adoption of generative Artificial Intelligence tools like Microsoft Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, and Google Bard. 

Stack Overflow is laying off 28 per cent of its staff as it struggles toward profitability due to the launch of various generative AI code generation platforms by the world’s top technology companies. CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar announced that the company is “significantly reducing the size of our go-to-market organization,” as well as “supporting teams” and other groups.

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“This year we took many steps to spend less. Changes have been pursued through the lens of minimizing the impact on the lives of Stackers. Unfortunately, those changes were not enough and we have made the extremely difficult decision to reduce the company’s headcount by approximately 28%,” company CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar wrote in a blog post.

The downsizing activity, which impacted the go-to-market and support teams, was a result of the company’s strategy to focus on its products and move toward profitability, especially at a time when macroeconomic conditions are uncertain, Chandrasekar said.

Also, Read – What is Generative AI

Moreover, Stack Overflow is also working on employee restructuring so that overall team performance can enhanced to boost performance and productivity. 

According to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi on job cuts in the technology sector, This year 1061 tech companies laid off 2,43,141 employees compared to 164,769 employees laid off last year

Tech Layoffs in 2022 -23: How many jobs reduced Employees Vs Companies

Stack Overflow: What is the reason for the job cut 

The research paper on ‘Are Large Language Models a Threat to Digital Public Goods? Evidence from Activity on Stack Overflow’ by  Maria del Rio-Chanona, Nadzeya Laurentsyeva and Johannes Wachs highlights that posting activity on Stack Overflow decreased by about 16% following the release of ChatGPT, increasing over time to around 25% within six months. Download Here: Research Paper 

“These results suggest that more users are adopting large language models to answer questions and they are better substitutes for Stack Overflow for languages for which they have more training data,” the authors of the study wrote.

Stack Overflow: Previous Layoff in May 2023

This is the second round of layoffs at Stack Overflow this year. The company is taking the layoff decision to meet profitability and business goals. Earlier in May, the company laid off 58 staffers. The impacted employees were from various departments such as UX designers, human resource professionals, product designers, and senior software developers. 

In recent days there have been instances of several layoffs at technology companies, including Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft. 

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