Stack Overflow lays off 28% of staff
It’s a tough day for technicians, with layoffs occurring in both sectors LinkedIn And the recently sold Bandcamp. Stack Overflow, the premier question-and-answer forum for programmers, says it is cutting about 28% of its staff.
Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow announced In a blog post on Monday, he said the company was persistently pursuing its “path to profitability.” The company wants to focus its energy on its product development efforts, so the go-to-market and surrounding teams will be primarily affected by the layoffs. Likewise, Chandrasekar blames Stack Overflow’s customers’ budgets, which he says have been impacted by the global economic woes.
“This year we have taken many steps to spend less. Changes have been made with a view to minimizing the impact on the lives of stackers,” Chandrasekar wrote in the blog. “Unfortunately, these changes were not enough and we have made the extremely difficult decision to reduce the company’s headcount by approximately 28%.”
Stack Overflow made a big hiring push last year as the company grew to over 500 employees, virtually doubling in size The edge. Of these new positions, 45% were in the go-to-market team.
The push couldn’t have come at a worse time, as programmers turn to new AI options rather than human call-and-response forums like Stack Overflow. According to reports, the platform recorded a decrease in traffic volume every month in 2022 with the average decline being 6%. In March 2022, Stack Overflow saw a 13.9% decrease in traffic compared to February and in April the site saw a decline 17.7% Decrease in traffic compared to March.
Related: GitHub survey found that 92% of programmers use AI tools
There was also other turmoil at Stack Overflow. This summer the company is Volunteer moderators announced a strike, citing the company’s ban on moderating AI-generated content on the platform. Stack Overflow says its new moderation policy will only remove AI-generated content in certain cases, claiming that over-moderation of posts created with artificial intelligence turns away human contributors. The decision to resort to AI content moderation comes later Stack Overflow has chosen to charge AI companies for training on the content of its website.
