We're a 5 person team at Ayalo (
http://ayalo.co) with one junior dev; we've had trouble making it work so I'll share some reasons why:
- Lack of confidence in his deliverables. The worst is being told its done because it works on local and for small data sets (he's in charge of internal analytics) and then when we try it on production with a months worth of data it crashes.
- Having to constantly remind him of the 80-20 rule. 80% of effects are due to 20% of the functionality and having to guide him to focus on that 20%. You want to be able to leave a dev working for two days, even a week, without worrying that he's accidentally inflating the scope of something. More experienced devs have a better sense of the importance and time-scale of the things they're working on.
- He's often so overwhelmed with having to learn things he doesn't know, or debug things he doesn't fully understand, that he doesn't have time or energy to think about ways in which to improve the company or product outside of his job description.
- Junior devs often need constant check-ins because they're sometimes ashamed of having to ask. This happens no matter how many times you reinforce that asking questions is the only way to learn, its human nature to a certain extent.
My perspective, from a bootstrapped pre-seed post-launch startup, is that early on you want people that can drive forward with you, that can push you, not people you have to pull along with you. We've kept our junior dev because he's motivated, passionate, and has potential. But I'd be lying if I said he doesn't hinder our speed