Counter-anecdote: one very successful SaaS startup I know launched with one unsupervised junior dev building everything, because they had no budget for more. He knew so little about coding he didn't even know what tech debt was when I spoke to him, a year in. But he got the v1 to market, which got them investment, and allowed them to hire in experience round him, and start paying off a mountain of tech debt. It was painful, but it worked. And, crucially, they could not have even got started if they'd not done it that way.
I don't think it's a "counter-anecdote". It worked DESPITE of the junior, not because of him.
The startup I'm currently working for has the same story. A junior wrote most of the code, but we got hired at the first round. It will take months to solve the spaghetti, but it might work, but I'm very experienced handling even huge and terrible code bases (300-500 thousand of lines of legacy code).
I ONLY know this story. In the past 15 years I've only seen "started out underfunded and as a mess" and ""never went live because of overengineering", nothing really in-between, but I'm in Europe where Seed Fundings are pretty small.
Actually it did work 'because of' the junior dev. They couldn't afford a senior dev, so the only viable path to success was to hire a junior. If the point of the original anecdote was 'don't hire a junior for your startup' the point of mine is 'sometimes do'.
I've seen this a few times. Terrible code but successful company. The companies could not have afforded better programmers. Instead of seed funding they funded with debt, technical debt.
The hardest part is explaining to the owners why it's so expensive to fix everything. They don't understand how it was so cheap to build yet so expensive to maintain.
I think a team of 1 developer is going to result in some not-too-bad code eventually (as long as the project is small and that developer is diligent and cares about the project).
But a team bigger than 3 developers where no one has any solid experience is a recipe for disaster IMO
If their product was made by one inexperienced dev and they got it to market and landed investment I can't think of a better time to invest in a rewrite or v2.
