Isn’t that what a boomerang promotion is?
- Bob works at Amazon as a SDE 2
- Bob finds getting promoted to SDE 3 is hard (despite being qualified) because the bar for promotion is too nitpicky/convoluted/whatever
- Bob quits and goes to work somewhere else
- Bob then applies for a job at Amazon again, but for a SDE 3 role. He lands the job, effectively getting a promotion in a really roundabout way.
The premise is that getting hired as a SDE 3 is presumably easier for someone who was already a successful SDE 2 than it is to navigate promotion committee politics internally for that same SDE 3 title.
This "trick" isn't limited to any specific company or role level; rather it's mostly a hypothetical scenario that is used as an insider joke when there's a perception of an overly obtuse promotion criteria.
In the context of this thread, I'm guessing they're saying that lowering the hiring bar would effectively open the floodgates for ex-amazon people to join back at higher paying roles since they were already able to pass the previously harder interviews.
Plus most shops will filter you out a resume screening level itself.
It would probably be a lot cheaper to change their hiring practices to be less strict and reinvest some of that money in training.