Actually you didn’t distinguish the kind or size of startup. You made a blanket statement, and are now retreating from it.

The one part of your article I agree with is that chemistry is vitally important. Without that, a startup will disintegrate. Right on.

You then spend the rest of the article explaining why seniors can’t form chemistry.

That’s ageism.

Again, this not an issue with seniority. That’s an issue with hiring practices.

If you already have a stable of junior devs, then you’ll have a challenge, because you’ll need to find a senior who is supportive of the learning process, who isn’t going to come in and take over without having the skills to make everyone feel good about it. It’s an uphill battle.

If you’re starting a company, you start with the seniors first. Then you bring in juniors they can mentor. If you start with the juniors first, you create friction because they’ll (a) have created code that may very well need significant refactoring due to inexperience, and (b) will be resentful of anyone who comes into their code base to change it.

If you start with juniors, you’re sacrificing so much to be cheap. You create the friction by bringing in seniors last.