Declining opportunities

You will get matched with founders who are not a fit. Decline cleanly, decline fast. The algorithm rewards honesty, not optimism.

Two types of decline

• Decline the match · before you have spoken to the founder. No score impact. Use this for stack misfit, calendar conflict, or anything else off the bat.
• Decline at the intro call · after the 30-minute call. Tell the founder directly, before the call ends. We log this on your profile, no score impact if it is a real fit issue.

The 2-hour window

Match requests expire 2 hours after they land. After that the match routes to the next engineer. Declining inside the window is fine. Letting the match expire counts as a soft decline and slightly lowers your response-time score (which is 10% of relevance).

What does not lower your score

• Declining a match because the stack is wrong.
• Declining a match because the timezone is unworkable.
• Declining a match at the intro call because the work is not a fit.
• Declining a match because you are at full capacity.

What does

• Ghosting a match request (no decline, no accept, no message).
• Accepting and then no-showing the intro call.
• Declining at the trial after you said you were a fit.
• Declining and then accepting a similar match the same day from a different founder.

How to decline well

One sentence is enough. “Stack is not a fit, I have not shipped Postgres in two years.” or “Calendar is full this week, please re-route.” Founders see your decline reason if it is constructive, redacted if it is not. They mostly appreciate the speed.

If you keep getting matches you decline

The matching engine is overweighting one of your skill tags. Update your profile in the engineer dashboard, narrow your stack list, narrow your vertical preference. Do not just keep declining, the algorithm interprets that as availability mismatch and your match volume will drop.

Anything else, engineers@cadence.work. Back to help center.