Fig. 10 — JavaScript engineering
Hire JavaScript developers
Engineers who join a codebase that already exists and become useful in it before they start having opinions about it.
Reading before writing
The first job in someone else's codebase is not to improve it. It is to work out why it looks the way it does: which conventions are deliberate, which are accidents nobody had time to undo, and which load-bearing oddity will break three things elsewhere if touched. We match what is there. When a pattern is genuinely worth changing, it gets raised with a reason — not delivered as a pull request that renames four hundred files.
- Existing conventions followed, including the ones we would not have picked
- Formatter and lint config taken from the repository, never from personal preference
- Refactors proposed separately from the change that motivated them
- Questions asked where the team can see them, so context does not end up in a DM
Working inside your process
You already have a way of working, and adding people is not an invitation to renegotiate it. We work in your repository, your branch strategy, your review process and your pipeline. If something there is going to hurt — a build that does not fail on a type error, a test suite nobody trusts, a deploy with no way back — we will say so once, with the reason, and then work the way you decide.
Where this stops being the right arrangement
This is people joining your team, under your technical direction. If what you actually want is for someone else to hold the architecture, own delivery and answer for the outcome, that is a different engagement and it is worth naming rather than discovering halfway through a quarter — we build products end to end as well, and the honest version of that conversation is easier before the contract than after.