First, show them respect by expecting that they will complete their tasks. That's not to say that you're setting them up for failure, make sure the tasks are ap

First, show them respect by expecting that they will complete their tasks. That's not to say that you're setting them up for failure, make sure the tasks are appropriate and they are committed, but don't spend your time trying to teach, at least not at first. At least some of them can educate themselves. Mitigate risk by having everyone write test code and do peer code reviews. You'll probably do a lot of fire fighting initially. If your team is >7 and truly none of your devs are "competent" (unlikely), then hire someone who is, even as a contractor. If you don't have headcount, then fire someone to get headcount. You need at least one other person you can rely on to fix urgent problems if you don't have bandwidth to do it. You said "very small start up" so I'm assuming team is <15, but if it's that size then you prob need sr devs to help you lead the team. With a couple good hires, you can wrangle a fairly large team of very junior devs. I've had dozens of devs (~30) report directly to me, and a lot more than that indirectly. I've never seen one who was totally incompetent. There was one guy, and no matter how much I tried to encourage him, he was performing way too poorly so I removed him from my team. Years later by coincidence I found out that he was working at a friend's company. I asked about him, and it turned out that he was a strong contributor on his team. People sense when you don't respect them and once that happens the interpersonal dynamic will negatively affect the team, so you have to police your own attitude. Maybe you don't have much experience leading a team. You could say, possibly, that you are as incompetent leading the team as they are in swdev. Please try to respect them regardless of their competence level. Find out your dev's strengths/weaknesses, so you know who to use when. I had one eng who wrote the absolute most heinous code imaginable, but he got tasks done super fast. I had to rely on him several times to meet customer delivery dates -- and had to accept the technical debt too. You make those tradeoffs.