I’ve been noticing many inexperienced startups founders who do not come from a technical background to have the tendency of hiring junior developers or interns to build their website or mobile app.

The complaints

Not too long after, they start having the following complaints:

1. My website/app keeps crashing or loads slowly
2. The development progress isn’t moving fast enough
3. The website/app doesn’t look professionally designed

Common [false] assumptions

“10 interns = 1 senior”

Many inexperienced startup founders assume that “hiring 2 junior developers at $60,000/year each gets me the same result as hiring 1 senior developer at $120,000/year”. This is NOT true.

A good way to put it: it doesn’t matter how many chefs you put in the kitchen, if none of them know how to cook chicken the right way, you’re not getting a good chicken dish.

“2x the engineers, 2x the result”

In engineering, adding more people doesn’t necessarily make development go any faster. In many cases, it slows down development. Adding an engineer to the team adds extra management overhead. Keep your teams lean.

“I don’t need an engineering lead to lead junior developers“

I’ve heard this so many times, “I took a coding class/bootcamp, I can now lead junior developers” or “I was a product/project manager before, I can now lead junior developers”.

Here’s the thing: to lead a team of developers, you need to understand the development process well enough to be able to provide guidance, supervision, and directions. Otherwise, you’ll be the “blind leading the blinds“