[lnsru]

This!!! Nobody gained any skill from writing vanilla code or “hello world” type programs. Experience comes from spending days and sometimes weeks on ugly bugs. Bugs are perfect to level-up juniors quickly and find ones with weak motivation. Because having no progress for hours is really really frustrating. Went recently through this cycle teaching colleague. Found out, there is no motivation at all.

[bitL]

Some people thrive when bugs are assigned to them early, some people thrive when whole new functionalities are assigned to them. Usually intersection of sets of these two kinds of people is close to empty and the worst mistake is to assume bugs first are good or new stuff first is good automatically.

[0xEFF]

When you give someone new functionality to implement and they don’t have experience fixing defects, they’ll likely add more defects along with the new functionality.

[bitL]

I am in the group that prefers new functionality; I can build state-of-art $10M business from the scratch in 3 months but if you ask me to debug old stuff for longer periods of time, I'll most likely leave or underperform. It's good to know what people you have on your team instead of assuming certain traits.

[TimTheTinker]

Our team always assigns a few cosmetic bugs to new developers during their first week - only because it helps them learn their way around our codebase.

Where they proceed from there depends on their strengths and interests.

[wolco]

I like both as long as they as smaller items. Bugs will help you to understand what is there and new functionality can be a good bridge where a new person can leverage existing experience.

[z3t4]

I was very fortunately that my skill level followed the complexity of problems, only several years into my career I had to deal with systems level complexity and scaling issues, working as a high level web developer. Some things are just magic for a beginner. As a manager you should make people feel confortable, and some people do not have the mindset for constant self improvement. And some people you need to protect or they would over-work themselves. The trick is to have a load/capacity balance. Take games for example you usually progress the difficulty, you do not start with the end boss, or most players would quit, and those that pass would find the rest of the game boring.