Stack Overflow cuts 28% of its staff

Developer community site Stack Overflow has laid off 28% of its staff, the Prosus-owned company announced Monday.

In a blog post, Stack Overflow’s CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar indicated that the company is focusing on its path to profitability. While the post didn’t elaborate on the reason behind the job cuts, it mentioned customers’ budgets shifting elsewhere “due to the macroeconomic pressures.”

“This year we took many steps to spend less. Changes have been pursued through the lens of minimizing the impact on the lives of Stackers. Unfortunately, those changes were not enough and we have made the extremely difficult decision to reduce the company’s headcount by approximately 28%,” Chandrasekar said.

While Stack Overflow is primarily a Q&A website for consumers it also has enterprise products like “Stack Overflow for Teams,” which helps organizations maintain a company-wide knowledge base.

The company didn’t specify the number of laid-off employees. However, since it had pushed its headcount to over 500 people last year, more than 100 people are likely to be impacted.

With generative AI gaining popularity for helping coders with different problems, Stack Overflow has seen its traffic drop as compared to last year.

In August, the company said that because of generative AI, it expects “some rises and falls in traditional traffic and engagement over the coming months.”

Earlier this year, Stack Overflow asked AI companies to pay for training data. In January, it barred users from posting answers generated by AI. The company is also trying to bolster its own AI capabilities. In July, it launched OverflowAI with features like generative AI-powered search.

Big Tech is also moving fast to make generative AI-aided products available for coders in a rapid manner. Last month, GitHub expanded access to its Copilot chat to individual users. In May, during its developer conference, Google announced a bunch of AI-centric coding tools including an assistive bot called Codey. The company has also trained its conversational AI tool Bard to help users with code generation and debugging.