"I see from your resume that you're more of a maintenance programmer, but we really need people who can hit the ground running, banging out new huge kernel modules. Maybe you could assist them, by writing unit tests, and fetching their coffee, so they can focus on the challenging new stuff?"

Is "new stuff" easier work than maintaining old stuff? I always thought it was the other way around. I always give greenfield stuff to the juniors. They fuck it up I fix it. It's basically like using chatgpt.