We were saddened to read the Emerging Tech Brew article “Before layoffs hit Google-owned Looker, workers unknowingly trained their replacements”. Our sources could not confirm our worst fears - another Netflix moment. We are referring to when Netflix moved out of Santa Cruz. We will follow up next week with more details.

March 21, 2022. Written by Hayden Field

Before they were laid off…

…one member of Looker’s customer-support team thought they were getting promoted.

They had worked on their performance review for over a week, digging up data to showcase their success at Looker, a data-analytics division housed under Google Cloud. On the evening of Tuesday, March 1, the employee received a next-day calendar invite for an “important” meeting with a hidden attendee list. They assumed it’d be good news. Then they signed on to the meeting and saw their manager in tears.

That employee was one of at least dozens of members of Looker’s US-based support team who lost their jobs in early March. The decision had been planned "a few months in advance," one Google Cloud exec said in an internal town hall after the layoffs, a recording of which was shared with Emerging Tech Brew. But until the day before, some Looker managers had no idea—even Looker’s head of engineering did not find out until after the fact.