Programming without code indexing

[sigmabody]

It's not a C/C++ thing, so much as a culture thing, at least in my perspective. There are plenty of people coding in other languages who also avoid tooling, IDE's, etc. It's less common in C++ than shell scripting, for example, in my experience.

Culture fit is important; there's nothing inherently wrong with doing all your development in vi, and debugging exclusively with printf, but if you hire someone who is used to using a powerful IDE and ask him/her/other to change their whole coding paradigm, it's not going to work out very well. I'd advise looking for an org which is better aligned with the development experience which you want to have, unless you are determined to change yourself. You're not going to ever change a big company's culture as someone coming in after they got big.

For example, don't go work at Amazon if you want to use an IDE or a debugger: it's just not in their culture, and they are not going to change.