Dive Brief:
- Two software development platforms announced plans to lay off staff Thursday, the latest in a series of job cuts that hit technology vendors this year.
- Microsoft-owned GitHub will reduce its workforce by up to 10% through the end of fiscal year 2023 as part of a push to align its business with customers’ needs. GitHub did not indicate whether these cuts were part of Microsoft’s previously announced layoffs. CIO Dive could not confirm how many workers were currently employed at GitHub.
- Competitor GitLab also announced layoffs impacting 7% of its workforce, or around 120 employees. GitLab CEO Sid Sijbradiji said a growing global economic downturn pushed the decision.
Dive Insight:
Big tech layoffs have affected tens of thousands of workers this year, which has spurred other companies to rethink staffing levels.
“Over the past several months, there have also been mass layoffs across large and small tech providers, so this could have a slowing down effect on development activity, which led to both GitHub and GitLab adjusting their own workforces,” Jason Wong, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said in an email.
Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion and, since the acquisition, has made further enterprise inroads. It recently launched GitHub Copilot powered by GPT-3, quickly gaining traction and accumulating 400,000 subscribers in the first month. GitHub has over 100 million users and is turning more of its focus to AI.
“The age of AI has started and we have been leading this change with GitHub Copilot, our most successful product launch to date,” GitHub CEO Thomas Domke said in a message to staff Thursday. “We have an enormous opportunity to build an integrated, AI-powered GitHub with urgency.”
GitHub also plans to move to a fully remote working environment, similar to competitor GitLab, which has been remote since its inception. Since the pandemic, many developer teams have stayed remote or have moved to remote work, and Wong expects this trend to continue.
