I'm pretty baffled by this layoff wave. I assumed sites like CSS-Tricks never turned a profit, but were a loss-leader (marketing expenditure) for a company like DigitalOcean. I still have to assume that's some of the best marketing they have. Cutting your marketing's golden goose is less strategic retrenchment, more battlefield amputation.
DO only acquired CSS Tricks very recently and have been quite gentle in terms of the branding there (other than in the emails where a lot of DO links have appeared in my experience).
Yeah, I also wonder this is a sign of a change in strategy. DigitalOcean was always developer friendly. Maybe they want to double down and start selling direct to enterprises. (I'm out of the loop, maybe that's already happening)
It's pretty hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone running a company that's steadily losing relevance, but personally I'd double down on the esoteric shit like CSS-Tricks, and then rebrand, as opposed to chopping off limbs and becoming even more B2B-ish and inaccessible to the next startup looking for a cloud service. What is their moat? Widen whatever they have. Jettisoning the most popular property sure seems like a preliminary to the executives cashing out.
