GitHub India Engineering Team Fired, Here Are the Details

GitHub India engineering team has been fired say reports quoting sources with knowledge on the matter. The engineering team had over 100 employees in India, and they have all been let go due to the teams being smaller in size than other locations, and taking care of responsibilities that are of lesser priority. The Microsoft owned platform had made it public last month that it would eliminate 10 percent of its workforce to cut costs.

Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. “Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation,” Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft had said at the time.

Thomas Dohmke, CEO, GitHub had announced this decision to its employees through an email that read: “We are announcing a number of difficult decisions, including saying goodbye to some Hubbers and enacting new budgetary realignments, designed to protect the short-term health of our business while also granting us the capacity to invest in our long-term strategy.”Dohmke had also stated in the email that the company would use artificial intelligence and this would be implemented on an urgent basis.

“The age of AI has started and we have been leading this change with GitHub Copilot, our most successful product launch to date. We have an enormous opportunity to build an integrated, AI-powered GitHub with urgency,” he said in the email. 

This new development was brought to light by Gergely Orosz who claims that he has confirmed the development with GitHub India engineers. “This layoff comes amidst the February layoffs announced. The strange thing is: why India, when cost of labor is much cheaper than eg US, and likely cheaper than EU? Perhaps the India team *was* not at the critical size, like it was the case w Uber and Lithuania?” He said on the layoffs. 

He went on to add: “That these cuts would not have as much impact on the org vs other ones would - given India teams did not own core things - could be part of the explanation on why they were chosen. It does go against the notion that lower cost of labor places are safer from cuts, though.”