Of course that is not how it works. The actual process depends on the company and how many levels of management are notified in advance. Usually it is some comb

Of course that is not how it works. The actual process depends on the company and how many levels of management are notified in advance. Usually it is some combination of bottom-up stack ranking and rolling down the quota to the individual teams. The process is - by design - very opaque, and there are so many variables to it that at the end it may seem like a random process to someone who is not privy to the decision process of the decision makers (and there may be anywhere from ten to few thousand decision makers in this process).