In a blow to San Francisco’s South Beach neighborhood, GitHub said Thursday it would close its headquarters (opens in new tab) near Brannan and Second streets and lay off 10% of its workforce, or approximately 300 employees.
The popular platform for collaborating on code has 100 million members but is shutting down all its offices to reduce costs and because most employees are working remotely. Bought by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2018, GitHub’s layoffs may be part of the software giant’s cut of 10,000 workers announced in January; it is not yet clear.
GitHub and Microsoft are some of the targets of a class-action lawsuit alleging one of the platform’s tools makes it easy for AI developers to steal other contributors’ code without giving them attribution.
Indeed, times must be tough in the dev-ops business, as GitHub’s rival, GitLab, announced a 120-person trim (opens in new tab) to headcount on the same day.
Tech Layoffs Continue To Mount
The tech industry has cut more than 90,000 jobs in the past year and the pace of announcements over the last two weeks shows the workforce-reduction trend may not end anytime soon.
Even the most profitable tech companies are citing slow growth, economic uncertainty, rising inflation and fear of a recession as a reason to cut thousands of workers. In fact, Silicon Valley has lost 10,000 jobs in the past six months, alone.
Yahoo said Wednesday that it will lay off more than 1,600 workers. The Sunnyvale digital media company says the cuts are a result of restructuring (opens in new tab) its ad tech unit.
Yahoo aside, here are the major tech companies that announced layoffs in recent days that will impact the Bay Area:
- PayPal The San Jose-based digital payments company announced it would cut 2,000 employees (opens in new tab) or 7% of its global workforce.
- Upstart In a cost reduction move, the San Mateo AI lending platform company announced it would lay off 365 employees (opens in new tab), amounting to 20% of its workforce.
- NetApp The San Jose cloud storage and data services company announced it would lay off 960 employees (opens in new tab) in the next three months, citing poor economic conditions as the culprit for the 8% workforce reduction.
- Lam Research Due to the chip industry downturn, the Fremont semiconductor manufacturing equipment company announced it is laying off 1,300 employees (opens in new tab) globally including 400 Bay Area employees.
- Dell The Texas hardware maker recently announced plans to reduce its global workforce (opens in new tab) by 6,650. The 5% reduction will likely impact its offices in Santa Clara and Palo Alto.
- eBay The e-commerce marketplace giant, headquartered in San Jose, announced plans to reduce its headcount by 500 (opens in new tab) or 4% of its workforce.
- Zoom The San Jose-based communications software company that connected workers through the pandemic has announced that 1,300 employees will be let go (opens in new tab), amounting to 15% of its workforce. It’s unclear whether these are global or domestic cuts.
San Francisco Layoff Tracker Update
After a relatively mild end to January, the number of San Francisco-based companies slashing headcount jumped again in the past two weeks: The Standard’s SF Layoff Tracker counted 2,759 layoffs at 16 companies.
Many notable San Francisco firms announced recent staff reductions, with the mortgage slowdown hitting Wells Fargo (140 (opens in new tab)) and SoFi (65 (opens in new tab)), as well as downturn-driven cuts at Autodesk (250 (opens in new tab)) and Okta (300 (opens in new tab)).
Affirm announced the largest number of layoffs by a San Francisco-based company with approximately 484 employees (opens in new tab) losing jobs as a result of poor earnings.
Check out the full list below of SF companies that laid off staff or companies based elsewhere that cut jobs in the city.