Stack Overflow had to lay off 28% of its employees

If you’re a developer in this day and age and you need help, you’ve most likely gone to Stack Overflow. This is a popular forum that’s meant to help people with their coding needs. However, according to the company CEO (via The Verge), Stack Overflow had to lay off about 28% of its staff.

Stack Overflow didn’t explain why it had to lay off employees

Stack Overflow’s CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar announced today that the company had to significantly reduce its staff by around 100 people. The company’s Go-to-marketing organization was affected by this as well as supporting teams among others. In an interview with The Verge, Chandrasekar said that the go-to-marketing organization was hit the hardest. About 45% of the laid-off employees were from that team.

So, this is a bit of a major blow to the company, but we’ve seen this happen with much larger companies. Last year, Stack Overflow made a large hiring push which boosted its workforce to more than 500. With hiring pushes, there’s always the chance that added operational costs will weigh the company down in the long run, and that seems to have happened.

Also, the global economy is in a tough spot. Many large companies are shedding employees due to rising costs and diminishing returns.

There’s one potential reason that we also can’t ignore

Over-hiring and the economy are valid reasons for this situation, but we can’t overlook another reason that’s in the back of our minds; AI. Since the start of the generative AI revolution, several industries have been hit harder than others. Artists and writers have seen the ugly side of AI, and the same goes for developers.

Since ChatGPT came onto the scene, people have been using it and other chatbots to generate code. People can simply ask the platform to generate code to perform certain tasks, and they’ll have the solution within seconds.

Well, if you’re able to turn to AI to code your app for you, why would you want to go to a help forum? This is the issue that Stack Overflow is dealing with. We can’t say for sure that the AI-splosion is the direct cause, but it’s definitely a contributing factor.

If AI is indeed the reason for this, then it’ll be another reason to keep an eye out for the effects of AI across different industries. We expect to see rolling lay-offs as time goes on, and there’s no way to predict just how bad it will get.