GitHub Sacks Entire India Engineering Team, Around 100 Workers Affected: Report

This comes after GitHub announced in February that it is laying off 10 per cent of its workforce within this fiscal year.

A GitHub spokesperson said as part of the reorganisation plan shared in February, "workforce reductions were made today".

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Microsoft-owned open-source developer platform GitHub has sacked its entire engineering team in India, according to a report by TechCrunch. The report cited a person familiar with the matter saying that over 100 workers have been affected. It says the company informed the employees about the job cut on Tuesday. 

This comes after GitHub announced in February that it is laying off 10 per cent of its workforce within this fiscal year. GitHub had about 3,000 employees before the layoffs were announced.

In an email to employees, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said sustained growth is important for every business.

"Today, we are the home of 100 million developers, and we must become the developer-first engineering system for the world of tomorrow. We must continue to help our customers grow and thrive with GitHub, expedite and simplify their cloud adoption journey, while supporting them every day," the CEO wrote.

"Unfortunately, this will include changes that will result in a reduction of GitHub's workforce by up to 10 per cent through the end of FY23. The hiring pause that I announced on January 18 remains in effect," he added.

Tech writer Gergely Orosz, who tracks global tech layoffs, especially among the engineering/developer teams, first tweeted about the development. 

What I am hearing: GitHub’s India engineering team is no more.

Yesterday, the complete dev team was let go at once. We’re talking of ~100 engineers. Engineers speculate this was done as teams were smaller than other locations, owning fewer & lower priority stuff. My thoughts:

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) March 28, 2023

"We're talking of 100 engineers. This was done as the team was smaller than other locations, owning fewer and lower priority stuff," he said in a tweet. Orosz said he confirmed the layoffs after "talking with (now former) GitHub India engineers".

A GitHub spokesperson told news agency IANS that as part of the reorganisation plan shared in February, "workforce reductions were made today".

It was "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," said the company spokesperson.

The open-source development platform already has 100 million users worldwide and is rapidly expanding in India, where it has over 10 million users who are developers. India now has the second-largest developer community on GitHub behind the United States.