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The Prosus-owned company announced Monday that developer community site Stack Overflow has laid off 28% of its staff.
In a blog post, Prashant Chandrasekhar, CEO of Stack Overflow, indicated that the company is focusing on the path to profitability. Although the post did not elaborate on the reason behind the job cuts, it did mention customers shifting budgets elsewhere “due to macroeconomic pressures.”
“This year we took several steps to reduce expenses. The changes have been made with a view to minimizing the impact on stackers’ lives. Unfortunately, those changes were not enough and we have taken the extremely difficult decision to reduce the company’s headcount by approximately 28%,” Chandrasekhar said.
While Stack Overflow is primarily a question-and-answer website for consumers, it also has an enterprise product, such as “Stack Overflow for Teams”, which helps organizations maintain a company-wide knowledge base.
The company did not disclose the number of employees laid off. However, since the number swelled to more than 500 last year, more than 100 people are likely to be affected.
With the rise in popularity of generic AI to help coders with various problems, Stack Overflow has seen its traffic decline over the last year.
In August, the company said that due to generative AI, it expected “some ups and downs in traditional traffic and engagement in the coming months.”
Earlier this year, StackOverflow asked AI companies to pay for training data. In January, it blocked users from posting AI-generated answers. The company is also trying to increase its AI capabilities. In July, it launched OverflowAI with features like generative AI-powered search.
Big Tech is also moving quickly to make generic AI-assisted products increasingly available to coders. Last month, GitHub expanded access to its Copilot chat for individual users. In May, during its developer conference, Google announced a bunch of AI-focused coding tools, including a helpful bot called Kodi. The company has also trained its conversational AI tool Bard to help users with code generation and debugging.
