[sigstop]

Most of my peers in school used the same "compile, debug" approach as well. Most of them are still doing it and I can't see any serious software company ever hiring them (there is no shortage of positions for mediocre programmers though, so, they're doing just fine). I don't think this symptom is unique to me and my lack of discipline. As to why I didn't just "learn" to use VS or "learn" to program better? It wasn't for the lack of trying. MSDN was worthless, written documentation (yeah, it was that far back) was worthless and all of the code that other people wrote in VS that I had to interact with was absolutely terrible. It wasn't until I switched my environment until that I got any better. I got more from a man page in an hour than I did from a week of reading MSDN.

As far as Eclipse; I've worked with large codebases and I was faster with vim and knew my APIs better than any of my colleagues who used Eclipse. I heard them complain about Eclipse freezing pretty much daily (as well as doing something wrong when it came to interacting with perforce, often in a devastating way). I know that I Got more things Done than any of them.