A couple years later, a new hire got assigned to a team I was on. He was a little bummed because he'd really had his eye on another project. So we talked to our manager about it and he was allowed to transfer to the team he'd been hoping for.
I have more anecdotes like this, but the long and short of it is that in my experience Google is a lot less capricious and uncaring an organization than you imagine.
I think the problem is that their interviewing process is. That's the first thing people encounter and it's the only thing rejected people encounter. That harms people's views of the company, even if they understand the explanation about false positives being so expensive.
And frankly, I've never once worked for a company where I was immune from re-orgs.
Well put. There were a lot of reasons I turned down my Google offer out of college and have been unenthusiastic to re-apply, but the process of saying "We'll find something for you" was a huge part of it. (The recruiter wouldn't even listen to something as simple as wanting SWE over SRE.) I ended up at a much smaller company where I could know my job and product and meet my boss before I signed.
I worked in the Mountain View office. Transferring is indeed easy, and people did transfer frequently. As a result turnover was high, and it was hard to build friendships, or gel as a team.
Every team after that is your choice with full access to information. Google has a thriving internal job market.