[foxfluff]

Aye. It's also not always obvious what's the optimal tactic, and I believe in many cases there are multiple equally valid approaches and you pick the one you feel most comfortable with. Sometimes the one you start with is a dead end.

That's why I don't really like an absolutist stance (if you rarely use debugger you're dumb / if you always poke around with a debugger you're dumb). I just happen to fall in the "rarely uses debugger" camp myself.

> I’ve done hundreds of interviews like this, and it’s fascinating watching what people do. Do they read the code first? Fire up a debugger? Add print statements and binary search by hand? [..] After hundreds of interviews I still couldn’t tell you which approach is best.

(From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29813036)