Tech layoffs keep coming. Microsoft-owned GitHub announced today that it will lay off 10% of its workforce by the end of the company’s fiscal year.
Before this announcement, which was first reported by Fortune, GitHub had about 3,000 employees.
The company will also close all of its offices once their leases are up, in part due to low utilization, and move to a culture of remoteness.
Github
GitHub will also continue the hiring freeze it first announced in January, as well as make a number of other internal changes to “protect the short-term health” of its business.
“We have announced a number of difficult but necessary decisions and budget adjustments to protect the health of our business in the short term and give us the capacity to invest in our long-term strategy moving forward.
You can view our CEO’s full message to employees below with more details on these changes,” a company spokesperson told us.
In a move that’s a little unorthodox for a company that prides itself on remaining independent of its corporate owner.
GitHub is also moving to Teams for video conferencing needs. And in another sign of cost reduction, the laptop refresh cycle is moving from three to four years.
“While our entire leadership team carefully considered this move and came to an agreement, the decision ultimately rests with me as CEO.
I realize this will be difficult for all of you, and we will treat this period with the utmost respect for every Hubber,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke wrote in an email to company employees today.
He notes that he wants the company to be “the first developer engineering system for the world of tomorrow” with a strong focus on AI.
Given GitHub’s recent focus on its Copilot and the overall shift at Microsoft towards all things AI, this is perhaps not unexpected.
Remote work will become a permanent employment arrangement for all employees of GitHub, the Internet hosting service for software development and version control.
Explaining that the transition will be gradual, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said: “We have been working to improve our operational efficiency and scale as a business.
One of our decisions is to move to a fully remote GitHub.
We are seeing very low 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 we will move to close all of our offices as their leases expire or as we are operationally able to do so.”
Sources: Techcrunch | Hrmasia