A boomerang employee is someone who leaves a company and later returns to it. Most of the time it’s made to get a bump in salary without having to go through a promotion process.
I worked for Amazon as a software engineer for four years. I left in 2021.
Last week I got an email from a recruiter in AWS. The conversation can be summarized like this:
- Recruiter: we miss you and surely you miss us! Do you want to boomerang back to AWS?
- Me: Maybe, but I want no live coding interviews.
- Recruiter: sorry, no.
I was… puzzled, to say the least.
Why title the email “do you want to boomerang?” if you are going to make me do interviews as if I were a brand new hire?
And why would you want to interview me as a brand new hire? Why do you need me to go through another coding interview? I publicly admit it, I hate those, for many reasons. But I worked for your company, you know I can code. And I left because I chose to, not because you decided suddenly that my code was not good.
Is it not in your best interest to make the process easier for me? Do you really prefer to hire someone completely new? Do you know how much time it takes a new hire to learn all of the amazon tools built in-house? I’ll tell you: it’s 6 months to a year at least.
The tech interview process is very broken…
Just Another Software Developer 