Image: Dennis Diatel (Shutterstock)
It’s a rough day for tech workers, with layoffs at both LinkedIn and the recently-sold Bandcamp. Stack Overflow, the go-to Q&A forum for programmers, says it’s cutting about 28% of its staff.
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Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar announced the layoffs Monday in a blog post, explaining that the company is remaining steadfast on its “path to profitability.” The company looks to focus energy on its product development efforts, so go-to-market and surrounding teams will be primarily affected by the layoffs. Likewise, Chandrasekar blames the budgets of Stack Overflow’s customers, which he says have been impacted by the world’s economic issues.
“This year we took many steps to spend less. Changes have been pursued through the lens of minimizing impact to the lives of Stackers,” Chandrasekar wrote in the blog. “Unfortunately, those 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 large hiring push last year when the company ballooned to over 500 employees, virtually doubling in size, according to The Verge. Of those new positions, 45% were for the go-to-market team.
The push couldn’t have come at a worse time as coders find themselves turning to emerging AI options over human call-and-response forums like Stack Overflow. The platform reportedly saw a drop in traffic every month in 2022 with the average drop being 6%. In March 2022, Stack Overflow saw a 13.9% drop in traffic from February and in April, the website saw 17.7% drop in traffic from March.
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Stack Overflow has not been without other sources of turbulence. This summer, the company’s volunteer moderators announced they would be going on strike, citing the company’s prohibition on moderating AI-generated content on the platform. Stack Overflow says its new moderation policy will only remove AI-generated content in specific instances, claiming that over-moderation of posts made with artificial intelligence was turning away human contributors. The decision to fall back on moderating AI content comes after Stack Overflow opted to charge AI companies for training on its website’s content.