Yeah, it's an organizational issue that I'm the only one in my team with more than 2 years of experience. I was hired just recently. The strategy of having one strong developer in a group of 3-5 (very cheep) juniors is not working out. We are growing painfully fast and the bottleneck is often finding good developers (that will work for peanuts). What I want to achieve here is an agile development team that can work on several projects at a time, i.e. a whiteboard with tasks coming in from several projects and where everyone in the team has knowledge of all parts of the systems.
To me it boils down to this: business men think money can be saved (and quality upheld) by having few or inexperienced developers, if only you manage them properly. I do not.
I agree with the business men in theory but not in implementation. It sounds like they're talking out of both sides of their mouths. You can certainly save money and uphold quality if you've invested the time/money in developing a solid process. If you don't spend the time to develop a process and don't spend the money on the people that can manage that chaos, you're going to have a bad time.
Unfortunately that's what this Startup Cowboy Culture seems to embrace. It's more about looking and feeling busy than actually producing any quality results.
To me it boils down to this: business men think money can be saved (and quality upheld) by having few or inexperienced developers, if only you manage them properly. I do not.