GitHub tells employees to prepare to work from home permanently

Remote work will become a permanent work arrangement for all employees of GitHub, an Internet hosting service for software development and version control.

Explaining that the transition will be a gradual one, Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, said, “We have been working to improve our operational efficiency and scale as a business. One of our decisions is to move toward a fully remote GitHub. We are seeing very low utilisation rates in our offices around the world, and this decision is a testament to the success of our long-standing remote-first culture.”

“We are not vacating offices immediately but will move to close all of our offices as their leases end or as we are operationally able to do so.”

READ: Remote work leads to increased productivity

GitHub’s decision to move employees out of the office also comes as the company joins the growing number of tech companies who have announced layoffs recently. Besides maintaining a hiring freeze that has been in place since January this year, GitHub will also be laying off 10% of its workforce through the end of the company’s fiscal year.

This comes after Microsoft, GitHub’s parent company, announced last month that 10,000 employees will be let go though to March 31 this year, impacting employees from multiple teams across the globe.