Like my sibling says, you can't always choose. That's one side of that coin. The other is: Some people are naturally good at writing "green field" (or re-writi

Like my sibling says, you can't always choose. That's one side of that coin. The other is: Some people are naturally good at writing "green field" (or re-writing everything) and do produce actual good software. But these same people, which you do want to keep around if that's the best you can get, are next to useless when you throw a customer reported bug at them. Takes them ages to figure anything out and they go down endless rabbit holes chasing the wrong path for hours. You also have people that are super awesome at debugging. They have knack for seeing some brokenness and having the right idea or an idea of the right direction to investigate in right away, can apply the scientific method to test their theories and have the bug fixed in the time it take one of these other people to go down even a single of the rabbit holes they will go down. But these same people in some cases are next to useless if you ask them to properly structure a new green field feature or rewrite parts of something to use some new library coz the old one is no longer maintained or something and digging through said new library and how it works. Both of these types of people are not bad in and of themselves. Especially if you can't get the unicorns that can do all of these things well (or well enough), e.g. because your company can't or won't pay for it or only for a few of them, which they might call "Staff level". And you'd be amazed how easy it is to get quite a few review comments in for even Staff level people if you basically ignore their actual code and just jump right into the tests. It's a pet peeve of mine. I start with the tests and go from there when reviewing :) What you really don't want is if someone is not good at any of these of course.