Honest question for founders - what actually went wrong with your developer hires?

Spent the last year talking to founders building mobile apps. Mostly Flutter, some React Native, a few hybrid setups.

The tech conversations were fine. The hiring conversations were not.

Almost everyone had a version of the same story. Freelancer disappears mid-project. Agency sends a junior after the contract is signed. Scope creep gets reframed as change requests. Deadlines become suggestions.

The frustrating part is that none of this is a Flutter problem. The framework works fine. The problem is structural.

When a developer is splitting time across four clients, your project gets whatever attention is left over. There's no real ownership. No one who knows the full context of why decisions were made three sprints ago.

I've seen founders lose months to this. Not because they hired bad developers necessarily, but because the engagement model wasn't built for continuity.

Curious whether others have run into this. What actually went wrong with your early developer hires, and what would you do differently?