If you're asking whether I was productive, yes, I was, just not sufficiently so apparently.
My failing was explained to me that since I was a "Senior Engineer(tm)" I was supposed to arrive at google an expert in all their technologies so I could be a successful generalist and finish my starter project (in a brand new unfamiliar field to me) in <2 weeks. Whatever.
In contrast, I reached productivity <48 hours after starting my next gig, which did make use of my skills.
My failing was explained to me that since I was a "Senior Engineer(tm)" I was supposed to arrive at google an expert in all their technologies so I could be a successful generalist and finish my starter project (in a brand new unfamiliar field to me) in <2 weeks.
They make up those expectations after the fact, of course. Rather than have the decency to say, "I just don't like you, and don't want you on my team" your manager had to build an objective-looking "performance" case and it sounds like he was a total twat about it.
No one gets anything serious done in the first 2 weeks, and you're not expected to. That's what Codelabs (which are very good, and I wish more companies paid attention to that) are for.
One thing I disliked about the Google environment was that, because it's so hard to have a real accomplishment in your first year, whether you "succeed" depends on others' assessments (i.e. politics). I prefer to be in an environment where, after 3 weeks, I can reach the "so good they can't ignore you" state.
I like high-productivity environments better because I can prove, in the first month, that I'm actually worth a damn. Political issues always exist, but they're less threatening when you've already proven that you're good at what you do.
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.
