[ry_ry]

I always ask debug questions in when I interview candidates, because it's a skill way too many devs simply don't have. in that situation i'd tell them what you thought was the issue and why, then proceed to prove it through the debugger.

Yes it's tedious, and in real life you fix it and move on, but not all bugs are that simple, and it's an interview so the aim of the game is to demonstrate your ability as a well-rounded developer.

[eugenis]

I used debugger during the first few years of coding. Then I learned the idea of coding without using debugger. I tried it. It was unnatural at first. But I wanted to see if it is really good or not. Without realizing it, I have done with the last 5 years writing a lot of codes day and night without using debugger. I wrote C, ObjC, Go, Java, C#, JavaScript, PHP. I can write code as soon as I wake up all the way until the moment I need to sleep again. I can read code as natural as I read an English essay. Sure there are some very badly written codes that is hard to understand, as there are badly written English articles too. I fixed trivial bugs (such as edge cases or typo) by reading it, more difficult one by enabling debug logs (much more productive in long run), there are separate tools for memory leak inspection, a hanged process can be inspected by process dump log.