Coding Forum Stack Overflow Cuts 28% Of Staff In Various Departments

Coding assistance forum Stack Overflow is cutting its workforce in different departments by 28% amid a cost-cutting drive the company is having as it moves toward profitability in the face of macroeconomic pressures.

Stack Overflow has taken "many steps to spend less" this year, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar said in a message to employees Monday, though he did not specify the measures taken. He added that the changes implemented "through the lens of minimizing impact" on employees have not been enough.

"We have made the extremely difficult decision to reduce the company's headcount by approximately 28%," he said.

The exact number of affected employees is unknown. The company's LinkedIn page states that Stack Overflow has between 501 and 1,000 employees, and more than 760 workers are on the recruitment platform.

VentureBeat estimated that around 215 workers will be affected by the layoffs. Stack Overflow did not immediately respond to International Business Times' request for comment.

According to Chandrasekar, the New York-based company is "significantly reducing" its "go-to-market organization" in the restructuring. Moreover, "supporting teams" and other unspecified units across the company will be affected by the reductions.

The CEO explained that the company has been "dealing with ongoing threats to customer budgets shifting due to macroeconomic pressures" that have been affecting the entire tech sector. The focus for this fiscal year is profitability and the new organizational structure should position the company to succeed in its initiatives, he added.

Chandrasekar did not specify the exact reasons that led to the company's cost-cutting measures. However, Google DeepMind researcher Mahesh Sathiamoorthy published a graph on X in July that indicated an approximately 50% dip in Stack Overflow traffic over the past one and a half years.

Startup founder Laura Wendel also took to X to express her observations about the layoffs, saying it "may be the first large layoff directly due to AI." Wendel said people are now directing their questions to ChatGPT instead of Stack Overflow, which has been providing insight and information through its forum to programmers for the past 15 years.

Earlier this year, Stack Overflow temporarily banned "all use of generative AI" on the forum, as users flooded the site with responses generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT. The site's mods said at the time that AI-generated answers looked correct at first but upon closer examination, many of them turned out to be wrong.

News of the layoffs at Stack Overflow came more than a year after the company doubled its headcount. Chandrasekar said in October 2022 that the company had around 525 employees, The Verge reported.

"Then we have folks literally all around the world in every possible country you can imagine," he added.

Founded in 2008 and acquired by investment firm Prosus for $1.8 billion in August 2021, Stack Overflow is just among the more than a thousand tech companies laying off staffers this year. More than 234,000 tech employees have been laid off so far in 2023, as per data from layoffs tracker layoffs.fyi.