The ability to lean down, pick up my cat, snuggle her, explain the problem while she looks at me like I’m a crazy person, and find the place to start looking once I trip over the contradiction in my understanding while I vocalize the logic has made me much, much better at troubleshooting and debugging.
I kind of feel like having a pet rescue organization on site with foster cats and dogs for people to bring to their cubes, bond with, and debug with would be a net positive for both the cats/dogs and programmers.