30+ years professional developer here. Tell me how you would debug a customer issue that happened yesterday on their system without logging and without being able to connect to their system? Manually using a debugger is a red flag for me. It tells me that the developer doesn’t understand how to automate debugging by automatically detecting invalid application states and logging the problem. The best developers I have ever worked with never use debuggers. The worst developers I have ever worked with used debuggers all the time. Because they had so little understanding of the code that they needed to manually step through the code to get it.
I think in a way you are both right. This argument goes both ways. I’ve seen developers have so little understanding of the code that they needed to add logs on every second line of it. I’m talking about stateless pure functions with clear inputs and outputs, here you should only have to log the input, possibly also the output, the rest is reproducible. Some would call this tracing, not logging.
The best systems are the ones that log just enough, but no more, whatever that means can be difficult to quantify. I find logs that are informative or actionable to an operator are the most useful, if a log entry appears more than once a minute and this entry is only useful for a developer of a particular submodule, it’s too chatty and likely an indication this module is not understood enough. If a system is doing its job it should for most of the time not say much. Getting to this state of log nirvana does however, as you say, require the best of developers.
Agree. It is how and why you use a tool that matters. Not the tool itself. So judging people based on the tool they use is probably wrong. The fact that I have only seen bad developers use debuggers might just be a coincident.
