Microsoft’s GitHub slashes nearly half of its India workforce, lays off 140

The layoffs have mainly impacted engineering roles, one of the sources said.

This is part of a global retrenchment plan that the company had announced in February, a spokesperson told ET in response to queries.

“As part of the reorganisation plan shared in February, workforce reductions were made today as part of difficult but necessary decisions and realignments to both protect the health of our business in the short term and grant us the capacity to invest in our long-term strategy moving forward,” the spokesperson said.

The development was first flagged by Gergely Orosz, a former Uber engineering manager, who runs a newsletter Pragmatic Engineer.

Also read | Layoffs in 2023: Accenture, Indeed, Amazon among latest firms to cut jobs amid economic turmoil

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India is a crucial developer market and a key engineering hub for GitHub. In 2020, GitHub announced the opening of its subsidiary, GitHub India, while also crediting the country for hosting its third largest community of developers.

In September last year, GitHub also made its developer platform available in India to help boost the startup ecosystem.

Eligible startups in India, and globally, were due to receive up to 20 seats of GitHub Enterprise free for one year, including support and guidance from GitHub technical experts. The company had reported 7.2 million developers in India on its platform out of its 83 million global count then.

“I am optimistic that everyone impacted will find a new home. GitHub team had amazing people with developer tools at heart for helping others,” the source, who is directly familiar with the development, told ET.

Early in February, GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij told global staffers in an internal memo that the company was going to reduce the size of its team by 7%.

“I had hoped reprioritizing our spending would be enough to withstand the growing global economic downturn. Unfortunately, we need to take further steps and match our pace of spending with our commitment to responsible growth,” he had said.

Sijbrandij attributed the decision to the tough macroeconomic environment, citing how client companies were taking a more conservative approach to software investments even while spending, and taking more time to make purchasing decisions.

Those impacted by GitHub’s decision, Sijbrandij said, would benefit with pay through respective transition periods, a severance of four months base salary, a removal of vesting cliff for select team members who have been granted company equity, healthcare resources, choice to retain company-provided hardware and home office equipment and outplacement services.

SAP, Google and Accenture are some of the global software service companies that have announced layoffs this year in India.