So what this implies to me is that the first year at Google is an additional hiring filter to weed out bad cultural fits who got past the previous hiring screen (which selects for walking encyclopedias of Comp Sci and recent Top Coder problems with a smattering of problem solving ability).

So they intentionally remove any element of choice in allocation, and throw people into the hopefully representative ensemble of all hiring teams at Google to test how one mixes with the average ideal spherical Googler. But if one ends up 2 sigma to the left of the mean, one is pretty much hosed. And that would likely have a 2-3% false rejection rate assuming this is a normal distribution and that most Google teams are sane. Not bad actually, but sucks for me.

Except that I don't think such a distribution is normal but more likely vastly oversamples the stinkers due to a twisted form of survivor bias because the stinkers have the highest departure rates, putting them constantly on the prowl for new meat oops I mean Nooglers (my small team lost several people during the short time I was on it and several Nooglers switched teams* hours before they would have started to avoid this allocation - I have a really funny photo of several sets of deflated welcome balloons next to what was supposed to be their desk after they had sat around for a couple weeks).

*The most important thing I learned at Google was that I should have secured my allocation before arriving as a condition of accepting employment. Failing that, one can sidestep the process on the first day if one has a friend on a team that is in need of people if one is insistent enough.