[gprisament]

I'd put it this way: If you find yourself spending significant time inside a debugger, you should probably rethink how you (or your teammates) have been developing code. Time is certainly better spent preventing bugs with unit tests, asserts, thorough documentation & thoughtful design.

That said, on the occasion when a bug does crop up (which will hopefully be rarely), the debugger is usually the fastest way to find the problem. A good programmer will be sure to root cause the problem rather than fixing the symptom. Debuggers are indispensable tools for working up the causality chain.