Every now and then, we hear a familiar kind of announcement in our weekly company meeting: Someone is joining OpenProject, except they aren’t actually entirely new. They worked with us before and have now decided to come back.
After hearing announcements like this a few times, we started wondering how often it had actually happened. So we took a look at the numbers: More than 10% of our current team have left OpenProject and later returned. Looking at more recent hiring, five of the 29 colleagues we hired since July 2024 had worked at OpenProject before.
That made us curious about their stories. Why did they leave? What happened in between? And what made them come back? And that’s how we ended up writing this article.
Note
In HR, employees who leave an organization and later return are commonly referred to as boomerang employees or boomerang hires. The phenomenon is well established and has been studied in HR research for years.
But coming back is only half of the story. People also had reasons to leave in the first place.
Some colleagues joined OpenProject relatively early in their careers and wanted to see what working somewhere else was like. One left to start a company with university friends. Others had things they weren’t happy with at OpenProject at the time. Sometimes gaining experience elsewhere is simply the right next step.
We don’t want to leave that part out. After all, it’s part of their OpenProject story too. So we asked some of our colleagues who left OpenProject and later returned one very open question:
What’s your OpenProject story, and why did you decide to come back?
Here are some of their answers:
“For me, it boils down to always having liked the work being done in the open and then seeing confirmation that this seems to have translated into good values. The fact that we don’t try to do tracking or other forms of surveillance capitalism was a plus for me. And seeing that co-workers from 10 years ago were still there was definitely also a good sign.”
“It doesn’t actually feel like coming back for me, but more like joining a new company with some familiar faces. I re-joined recently for reasons which were not a concern for me in 2012, such as digital sovereignty and no big-tech or VC dependency.”
“When I left, OpenProject was going through a restructuring and reinventing itself a bit, and the position I’d had simply wasn’t there anymore. A few years later, I was looking for a change when my former boss reached out to me. That felt like a real vote of confidence and made coming back an easy conversation. What I really like about my role now is that I can focus deeply on one area, rather than trying to cover a little bit of everything across the spectrum.”
“I left my working student position at finnlabs, as OpenProject was called back then, to start my own company with friends from university. That ended when I moved out of Germany, and after that I freelanced for years, first as a developer and later as CTO, mostly for startups. Some of those products I handed over at some point, others simply failed. I came back because I wanted to stay with one product long enough to live with my own decisions. It helps that the role is more product but still technical, that it’s open source, and that I already knew I liked the people.”
Different paths can lead back together
The answers above aren’t simply three variations of “OpenProject is a great place to work”.
One colleague doesn’t really consider it a return to the same company at all. That makes sense to us. People grow over the years, and companies do too. For companies, growth doesn’t only mean getting bigger.
And choosing OpenProject twice doesn’t mean that leaving was a mistake. People gain experience elsewhere, their priorities develop and sometimes, years later, OpenProject feels like the right choice again.
When colleagues stay in touch
We’ve also seen another way in which people find their way back to OpenProject. After leaving, some former colleagues stayed in touch with people who continued working here. In several cases, that eventually got them talking about OpenProject again.
Personal recommendations also play a role beyond returning colleagues. Some people first hear about an open position from someone they know at OpenProject.
We value that. After all, recommending your own employer to someone you know is quite different from us telling people why they should work here.
Choosing OpenProject twice
OpenProject isn’t the right employer for everyone, and what people need from their work can evolve over the course of a career. Which makes it all the more meaningful to us when someone’s path leads back here.
We could finish with our own list of reasons to work at OpenProject. For this article, we’d rather leave those reasons to the people who knew OpenProject, left, and later decided to choose it again. We’re very glad they did.
Interested in working at OpenProject? Visit our career page.
