Indian American CEO of Stack Overflow announces 28% job cuts as AI boom continues

iNDICA NEWS BUREAU–

Online community for developers Stack Overflow led by Indian American CEO Prasanth Chandrasekar announced on Monday that it will lay off 28 per cent of its staff (over 100 employees) as it struggles towards profitability amid the AI coding boom. Chandrasekar said the company is “significantly reducing the size of our go-to-market organization” and “supporting teams and other teams across the organization 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 its founding. “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.