[mattbrewsbytes]

Your question is who would you hire... which is invalid unless you are handing out timed coding assignments as part of your hiring process. That would be absurd and a huge red flag for a candidate in my opinion.

As a manager observing people's work, people work at different paces and come up with different solutions. No two employees are the same. As long as someone is progressing their skills and getting work done in a quality manner, it doesn't really matter if someone is faster than someone else.

In my opinion, someone that thinks they are better because they are faster also has a higher possibility to have an attitude problem on the team which is a bigger issue.