When I asked them "what's the earliest time you think the underlying problem might be occurring, and what's the simplest check you could put into the code to detect it sooner?" they all gave some variant of an "oh, wow, what a good idea" response.
These were all people with 2-4 years of experience.
So I'm wondering: Are the available of good debugging tools actually making us less capable of debugging by appearing to remove the need to think deeply? Have we moved out of our Pioneering phase, where individuals have to be resourceful to survive, and into a Settler phase, where people can usually rely on someone else to provide the debugging service for them, and then let those skills atrophy?
What are you seeing? Are "kids these days" more, or less capable debuggers? What's in your bag of debugging tricks that seems to be missing in others'?
Clarification: I'm not talking about the debugging skills (or debugging avoidance skills) that people apply to their own code. This question goes to the skills that need to be applied when working in a multi-100Kloc system.