[lmm]

Tesla was a genius; he often bemoaned the way Edison would perform a hundred experiments to discover something which was (to him) obvious if he just thought about it for a bit. But you know what? Edison succeeded where Tesla failed, and a good part of that can be attributed to reducing the art of inventing to an almost mechanical process, leaving his intellect free to concentrate on more important matters.

It's the same with debugging. I've worked with many programmers who took your attitude; some of them were more talented than I. But I fixed bugs faster than them, and got more done, because I let the tools take care of figuring out what was happening in a program to cause a bug, leaving me more time to think about other things.

[zer0gravity]

I'm not shunning tools. I'm just stating that taking time to really understand the overall architecture, and allowing yourself some time to think at the problem before jumping into debugging can take you very far.

Now, depends what you understand by success, but for me success != productivity, and I would say it has more to do with the real long term value you deliver...

[ZenoArrow]

"Edison succeeded where Tesla failed" Edison was probably a better businessman, but a better inventor? Are you sure?