Online community for developers Stack Overflow on Monday announced to lay off 28 per cent of its staff (over 100 employees) as it struggles towards profitability amid the AI coding boom.
Its CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar said the company is “significantly reducing the size of our go-to-market organisation and “supporting teams and other teams across the organisation are impacted as well”.
“Over the last 15 years, we’ve built Stack Overflow into an industry-crucial knowledge base for millions of developers and technologists. During this time we’ve experienced years filled with opportunities and challenges. This year is no different,” he wrote in a blog post.
“Changes have been pursued through the lens of minimising impact to 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 per cent,” Chandrasekar added.
AI-generated coding answers have been problematic and the company issued a temporary ban on users generating answers with the help of an AI chatbot in December last year.
Chandrasekar said that this year, they took many steps to spend less.
“Our focus for this fiscal year and into the next is profitability and that, along with macroeconomic pressures led to today’s changes,” he noted.
The company last month celebrated a decade and a half of Stack Overflow.
“Over the last 15 years, our community has helped to create an incredible library of knowledge, with more than 58 million questions and answers,” it said.
