Stack Overflow is going to lay off 28 percent of its staff. The platform is struggling with profitability, as the news also brings to mind challenges posed by the rise of generative AI tools.
The announced mass layoff at Stack Overflow is notable because the community platform for developers was on a hiring spree just last year, looking to bolster its marketing team in particular. In April of this year, however, 10 percent of staff was already laid off.
According to CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar, the reason for cutting 28 percent of the workforce is that the platform is struggling to make a profit. A lot of work has been done in the past year to cut costs, but despite this, the financial situation has apparently not improved.
As a result, Stack Overflow is having to cut back on its workforce. It is striking that the marketing department is being affected the most right now. Support staff and other departments also face mass layoffs, says the CEO.
Generative AI
It’s possible that Stack Overflow is in trouble because developers today are less dependent on community forums for solving development problems. The rise of widely available generative AI tooling and chatbots gives developers new options for solving their code problems.
As a result, they can more often solve their problems faster, especially if they are integrated into the code tooling they use, than if they try to find answers through a community forum.
In addition, Stack Overflow itself is highly critical of the use of generative AI tools and chatbots. Since December, users of the forum have been prohibited from providing answers to questions using generative AI. Since this was not strongly enforced, many moderators went on a prolonged strike, resulting in the various answers not being checked.
Furthermore, Stack Overflow also previously announced that it wants to be compensated for the data generated by the platform and used to train third-party LLM models.