One of the rampant news amongst tech companies is layoffs, and we have seen many great tech giants cut off some of their workers. The latest layoff news is from GitHub, which plans to cut jobs of about 10% of its workforce through the end of its fiscal year. Before the announcement, GitHub had about 3,000 workers, and the company would close all its offices as their leases ended. Also, they will move to operate remotely because of their low utilization. The company will also continue the hiring freeze, which was announced first in January. They also plan to make several internal changes to cover the short-term health of their business.

The Layoff Memo from GitHub CEO

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced the layoff and sent an email to its staff; you can read it below.

Today, we are announcing some difficult decisions, including saying goodbye to some Hubbers. Also, we are enacting new budgetary realignments designed to protect the short-term health of our business while also granting us the capacity to invest in our long-term strategy. With great respect for Hubbers, I first want to clarify why we are making these decisions and what it means for GitHub’s future. Sustained growth is essential for every business. For GitHub, this means that we continue to enable more productive developers across the globe and move quickly as our opportunities to help our customers change.

Today, we are the home of 100M developers, and we must become the developer-first engineering system for the world of tomorrow. The age of AI has started, and we have been leading this change with GitHub Copilot, our most successful product launch. We have an enormous opportunity to build an integrated, AI-powered GitHub urgently.

We must continue to help our customers grow and thrive with GitHub, expedite and simplify their cloud adoption journey, and support them daily. This will require intense focus and changes to how and where we invest our finite resources. To start, we will align our work with the areas where we can best impact these goals and our customer's needs across all our products. Unfortunately, this will include changes that will reduce GitHub’s workforce by up to 10% through the end of FY23. 

Several Hubbers will receive notifications today, and others will follow as we re-align the business through the end of FY23. The hiring pause that I announced on January 18 remains in effect. Although our entire leadership team has carefully deliberated this step and come to an agreement, ultimately, as CEO, the decision is mine. I recognize this will be difficult for you all, and we will approach this period with the utmost respect for every Hubber. We will speak with impacted Hubbers so that they understand the transition compensation and COBRA/COBRA equivalent (outside the US) that will be provided. Career transition services assistance benefits will also be offered.

We have also been working to improve our operational efficiency and scale as a business. One of our decisions is to move toward a fully remote GitHub. We see meager utilization rates in our offices around the world, and this decision is a testament to the success of our long-standing remote-first culture. We are not vacating offices immediately but will move to close all of our offices as their leases end or as we are operationally able to do so. We will share more workplace details and transition plans with you as they are finalized.

We are looking at further reducing our operating costs. We will share details and transition plans with you in the coming months, but I wanted to share two decisions with you: 

i) Effective immediately, we will be moving laptop refreshes from three years to four years. 

ii) We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for video conferencing, saving high costs and simplifying cross-company and customer conversations.

This move will be completed by September 1, 2023. We will remain on Slack as our day-to-day collaboration tool. Finally, I extend my deepest gratitude to every Hubber and their incredible talents that have helped GitHub grow to where we are today. Every commitment you have made and every day you have worked has helped construct GitHub into the largest and most important software development platform.

Thank you for your dedication, resilience, and passion for empowering millions of software developers around the globe.

Final Words on GitHub

The fact that GitHub wants to start operating remotely is good for some people, but cutting jobs is affecting more people. The layoffs from the tech sector are increasing rapidly, as we have some layoffs from Twitter, Amazon, Meta, Chipper Cash, Splunk, Zoom, and other tech giants.

If you need some job updates, feel free to check HERE.