Embracing career progression and growth: The value of “boomerang” employees

They say that if you love something, you should let it go. If it comes back, then it’s yours forever. But does that hold true for our work careers as well as our personal lives? In recent years the phenomenon of the “boomerang employee” – someone who leaves and then returns to a company – has become a hot topic. Two of Sonos’s current employees have been on that exact journey, and share their thoughts on what they’ve learned.

Brian Miller first joined Sonos in 2010, moving between a number of different roles, from manually testing music integrations to automation to APIs, before managing a software testing team. After nine years, he was happy at Sonos but received an offer he couldn’t refuse. 

“The only reason I left was because a very compelling company in a unique category (aerospace) knocked on my door,” Miller explained. “They wanted me to manage their flight software test team. And I assumed they’d got the wrong guy. When it turned out they didn’t, I thought, ‘Okay, I should explore this.’” 

Miller left shortly after, followed by a well known Big Tech company, before eventually finding his way back to Sonos. Miller talks positively about the creative energy he felt working in new ways on wildly different products.

“At the Big Tech company, I was working on a prototype project, so there was a lot of experimentation there. The aerospace company was similar, they’re literally just prototyping everything all the time, which was amazing.” 

But there were also difficulties in adjusting to different corporate cultures. “What was really different, culture wise, was the people management,” Miller recalled. “The pressure of what you’re expected to do, how you’re expected to manage people or your teams, and deliver results was very different from my experience at Sonos.” 

For boomerang employees, there’s often an underlying theme: balance. Not only do employees want to be involved in ambitious and exciting projects, but they also want clearly defined roles and expectations within them.

Ron Kuper’s experience both mirror and diverge from Miller’s boomerang journey. Obsessed with digital sound from a young age, Kuper joined Sonos from an audio software company in 2007 to head our rapidly-growing software team. Internal growth and movement was a theme here, too. With Kuper shifting to oversee Sonos’ music partnerships, then the developer program, and eventually the Advanced Concepts Lab, working on first-of-its-kind products and technologies. Fast forward to 2019, he wanted a new challenge and additional managerial seniority.

“I’d been with Sonos for 12 years, I’d got the reward of being part of a successful IPO, but I also felt career-wise like there was something more that I wanted, in terms of leading a big engineering organization,” Kuper said. 

Hired by a competitor in the audio space for a new division, his experience outside Sonos was the exact opposite of Miller’s, involving a corporate culture that felt positive and empowering, but an unexpected distance from the creative engineering that really fired him up.

“The company did really care about helping people find their career objectives but I soon discovered I wasn’t doing any hands-on engineering,” he said. “I was just managing people. Which I’m happy to do, and feel I do reasonably well, but I really felt the distance from the technology.”

For starkly different reasons, both Miller and Kuper eventually decided that the move away from Sonos wasn’t working out. What brought them back, in both cases, were personal connections. 

“It all goes back to the relationships I built at Sonos,” Kuper said, describing the conversations with former colleagues which eventually led to him returning to the Advanced Concepts Lab. “I think I took for granted the interpersonal relationships I managed to build after being here for almost 10 years. When people tell me they’re considering a switch I do remind them not to discount that side, because there’s a lot of time and effort which goes into fostering relationships.”

For both, their time away from Sonos, and learning from different work environments and cultures, has meant that their returns feel very different. 

“It helped me step back and ask whether my decisions are rooted in data, rather than stereotypes, and look at what we’re doing in a way that I wasn’t able to before,” Miller said of his experiences in a more rigidly results-driven workplaces.

For Kuper, it’s meant thinking differently about what career progression looks like, and focusing on his day-to-day workload rather than chasing a more senior job title. 

“I know now that if I’m not spending half of my week directly involved with engineering something, that’s going to make me a little antsy,” he said. “I wouldn’t be opposed to leading a small team again, but when it gets to the point where being a manager becomes the all-consuming part of the job, that’s when I need to say no thank you.”

Neither Kuper nor Miller regret their decisions to leave, or the insights they’ve gained from working outside Sonos, but both seem very happy to be back. 

“Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate when you’re here how much we actually get done as a company,” Kuper said, citing Sonos’ commitment to diversity and inclusion and a familial, supportive approach to employees’ work-life balance. Both he and Miller appreciate Sonos’ nimble, open-minded stance on new ideas, and things like our Hack Week, as key factors in our corporate culture, which aren’t necessarily guaranteed elsewhere. And both would urge others to think very carefully about whether they’d recommend that “boomerang” journey to others. 

“If you stay in one place, then you learn how to do what that company does really, really well. But diversity in thought is really valuable to an organization,” Miller said. “My advice to anyone considering this is to be intentional with your decision. Make sure you’re going in with eyes open, both about what you’re gaining, and what you’re giving up. You might be losing those personal relationships, but gaining a new skill set or different perspective which could be valuable to bring back. As long as you’re intentional on your way, leaving a company doesn’t necessarily mean that the door’s closed behind you.”