In my experience this isn't the case at all. There might be some developers who are good everywhere, but most excel in a subset of all possible roles/cultures.

In my experience this isn't the case at all. There might be some developers who are good everywhere, but most excel in a subset of all possible roles/cultures. For example compare the environment of a "ship it now" web startup to that of an engineering company focused on safety and product support cycles. Some people can do well in both, but many programmers used to one environment will be frustrated and less effective in the other one, at least without quite some time to adjust.