Microsoft’s GitHub culls over 140 jobs from India team

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Microsoft-owned GitHub, a platform where software developers collaborate, has laid off over 140 workers in its engineering team in India.

News of the layoffs was first reported by Gergley Orosz, the software engineer behind The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter. Orosz also shared that the engineers he spoke to speculated that the job cuts came as GitHub’s team in India was smaller and working on lower-priority areas.

Confirming the news, a GitHub spokesperson told Tech in Asia that the layoffs are part of the reorganization plan it shared earlier this year, which involved cutting 10% off its global headcount through the end of 2023.

The person added that the layoffs in India were “part of difficult but necessary decisions” that would help “protect the health” of the business in the short term and allow it to invest in its “long-term strategy moving forward.”

However, the GitHub representative did not disclose exactly how many employees were affected by the job cuts.

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Thomas Dohmke, GitHub’s CEO, had previously told staff that the company will also go 100% remote. These moves were made due to “new budgetary realignments” that the company had to adopt.

GitHub was founded in 2008 and has since grown to have over 94 million developers from 90 of the Fortune 100 companies. The platform was acquired by Microsoft in 2018 for US$7.5 billion in stock.