Eh, in my experience "time spent in the debugger" correlates positively with how good someone is at programming, because the weakest programmers I have worked w

Eh, in my experience "time spent in the debugger" correlates positively with how good someone is at programming, because the weakest programmers I have worked with have no idea how to drive a debugger and never use one. In single-threaded environments (like most unit tests) I think a debugger is an enormous productivity enhancer. I think "time spent quickly making minor changes, re-compiling, and re-running the code" is a better indicator of weak debugging skills, but that still doesn't mean they are a "bad programmer". Often all they need is someone with stronger debugging skills to walk through an example debugging session with them, and teach them what techniques and tools they would use to approach the problem.