[mypastself]

In my experience, developers who don’t use a debugger belong to one of two groups:

1.) Older hacker types for whom it was previously unavailable or difficult to set up, so they learned to work (well) without it.

2.) Juniors/fresh grads, who often seem intimidated by it, likely because teachers and online resources didn’t emphasize it sufficiently.

I think the first group would benefit from introducing a debugger into their work process, but for the second group it should be essential.

[cosmotic]

In my experience, there are two intermediate group:

3.) Folks that are, for whatever reason, satisfied with log statements and can't be bothered to learn something new

4.) TDD die-hards where a debugger is evidence of a failure to follow the TDD manifesto

I'm a huge proponent of debuggers but I've encountered Senior SWEs that are not old-hackers or just-out-of-college.