GitHub lays off India engineering team, over 140 employees hit

New Delhi: Open source developer platform GitHub has laid off its entire engineering team in India, its second largest developer community after the US, which affected more than 140 employees as part of the "reorganisation plan".

Tech writer Gergely Orosz, who tracks global tech layoffs especially among the engineering/developer teams, the Github team in India has been let go at once.

"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".

Sources later confirmed to IANS that more than 140 GitHub India employees, also from product teams, have been asked to go.

A GitHub spokesperson told 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.

Microsoft-owned open source developer platform in February announced it was laying off 10 per cent of its workforce through the end of the company's fiscal year.

GitHub had about 3,000 employees before the layoffs were announced.

In an email to employees, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke had said that 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.

The open source developer platform has reached 100 million members globally, and is growing fast in India too where it has crossed 10 million developers on the platform.

This makes India the second largest developer community on GitHub, behind the US.