Ask HN: Do failed engineer founders have trouble getting hired?

Would suggest you preface this with "Ask HN"

My 2 cents: nope, not for most companies. Of course the tech skills have to be there, but being a founder shows a level of commitment and care for the user that I'd love to see in every senior engineer.

According to one recent study, yes:

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/startup-founders-are-...

No, I do not believe engineer founders have problems getting hired. They are "experienced" and "know the ropes". Startups rarely fail because of a boffo in engineering.

There's no concrete black and white answer here. I'd bet a small percentage of people might hold a startup failure against you for some irrational reason.

But the vast majority of experienced people in the industry understand that a very large percentage of startups don't survive more than a year or two and if you were able to execute technically, that's what matters.

I've never heard of this being a problem. Depending on the company you're applying to, it could actually be a point in your favor. It shows initiative, etc.

Some companies actually look for this. IIRC rippling has a specific job posting for this.

Yes, being a founder is like a "do not hire" stamp. Half of the interviewers feel insecure and start a pissing contest. The other half feel like I might be too opinionated (I'm not, everybody loves me after I eventually get hired).

Most startups fail because of business side problems, not technical problems.

Sales and marketing are hard, and most startups grossly underestimate how hard it is to sell their idea/product/company. The tech side is usually pretty easy by comparison.

So unless you wrote your backend with Access, you should be OK. And even then Access might have been the Right Choice at the Time.

Startup experience isn't valued by anyone at large companies. They are there because those people don't value the skills needed to succeed in a startup, which is generalism and the ability to learn and apply new things quickly. It isn't looked down upon except by a few insecure people, which you can find anywhere, but it definitely isn't valued.

Yeah, I have personally made that experience and received the same feedback directly from hiring companies and headhunters.

A close friend of mine had to emigrate to another country after successfully exiting his startup with tens of millions in the bank. Top recruiting firms in the US didn’t know what to do with him and considered him not “specialized enough” for the US market.

Other markets such as Europe hire very differently. There, employers aren’t necessarily looking to fill narrow roles with “bandaid employees”, but want people to have breadth and grow within the business across future roles.

In fact, this is precisely the feedback I also got from a top headhunting firm where I worked with the head of US tech recruiting and the EU counterparts.

Put differently, the “founder penalty” isn’t as much of an issue overseas.

I’m still baffled by it…

Anecdotal, but I did not experience this at all. I bootstrapped a B2B SaaS company to exit, worked for the acquiring company for two years, and then applied to (and got offers from) ~5 companies in the startup and FAANG-adjacent space. Not a single one seemed to consider my experience negatively. In fact, most commented on it positively and it seemed to help make the initial phone screen rounds go quite well (recruiters and hiring managers were really drawn to asking about my experience as a founder).

People tend to gauge others by their own strengths. Your experience building a company from 0 to 5000 monthly users won't be valued as much by a tech lead who manages a product with 5 million daily users.

I ended up in jobs building things from scratch after that. Consulting for pre-investment companies. Consulting billion dollar companies who wanted a full rewrite of their flagship product. Building experimental products for startups.

But in the past, the demand for engineers is extremely high and it's not hard to find a job anyway.

Not sure about that, but successful ones do (personal experience).

Personally from what I've seen, yes! Recruiters don't see your founder experience as real experience. And engineering managers think you will get bored and won't like doing the grunt work.