We did a bulk interviewing round a couple years ago and the person I fought hardest for thought she flunked the interview because she had to dump into the debugger to figure out why her code was broken.
Going into the debugger is precisely why I picked her over several other people. People struggle with crap there is no value in struggling with and it doesn't make you a stronger coder to keep banging your head against the wall. It makes you stupid or a masochist. And I hate dealing with code written by masochists. Stupid people usually write code that is broken in obvious ways. Masochists prefer torture.
Going into the debugger is precisely why I picked her over several other people. People struggle with crap there is no value in struggling with and it doesn't make you a stronger coder to keep banging your head against the wall. It makes you stupid or a masochist. And I hate dealing with code written by masochists. Stupid people usually write code that is broken in obvious ways. Masochists prefer torture.