“From “aha” to “oh shit”, we’re sharing everything
on our journey to $some_amount_of_money.

Since my cofounder and I were both technically savvy, we were comfortable hiring junior designers. The benefit was we could teach them what we wanted them to know while being budget conscious for our client.

When we were running at that pace at that time, that was a fine strategy. Now that we’re trying to complete more and more projects, the overhead and hand holding required by hiring junior designers isn’t an option anymore.

So, in my estimation it comes down to this: Do you have senior talent on your team that can lead development? If so, do you have the room (time & money) to train junior developers and mold them in your image?

I worked with code that had no comments, had magic happening (wasn’t possible to follow the code execution), and wasn’t otherwise documented. It would take 3 to 6 months to get competent, even for someone like me who’s good at their job. I took notes, had other people send me notes. At the end of 6 months I spent a day organizing the document and fleshing it out. The end result was a document that would allow people to become competent in a couple of weeks.

Startups have to get creative about making quick progress. Since hiring senior developers very early can be hard, I saw one approach that worked for some founders. It is getting a senior technical person only in a part time mentor/advisor role and hiring a very smart junior developer full time. This way, you can make quick progress and grow your talent. When the startup grows, you can also think about getting this part time mentor/ advisor in full time role (you would also tested his/ her ability to lead teams and grow people).

For remote teams specifically, I wouldn’t recommend hiring a junior developer at all. So much of the learning and growth happens through osmosis from other more experienced people, and Slack and all the other tools are great but still cannot produce that kind of environment. You’re doing the junior dev a disservice because it will be much harder to grow and learn in a remote environment.