"Given a string S and a set of words D, find the longest word in D that is a subsequence of S." Found under "Foundations of programming" -- this is exactly the type of problem I'd expect as question one under this section. When it's made by Googlers, that is. I make a lot of cool stuff day to day, and usually that requires a lot of code and knowledge about programming and topics that are rather advanced (currently I'…
The underlying issue with the problem is that there is probably no one size fits all approach. Individual variability might as well be immeasurable. The best you can do is put out as much valid information and schemas as you have in approach to a solution to the problem. Tricks of the trade, heuristics, best practices. A full fledged scientific understanding of how the brain assimilates coding knowledge hasn't been established. It may not even be known if our knowledge of the brain is adequate enough to begin that research.
As the history of computing has changed over the decades, the nature of coding changed as well. More and more abstraction has been layered and now it's easier to code than it ever has been. It's like all these macros have been set up so that the programmer only has to work at one level.
Google is naturally going to promote its own system, but it is not Google's responsibility or role to claim to present some final statement on how to approach it.
Regardless, so much knowledge that used to be stored only in people's heads has been offloaded onto software, and the nature and requirements of coding have changed with it.
On top of it all there may simply be too much of it (computer science, mathematics, programming languages) for any single individual to learn it all in a strict completist sense.