This is great but the premise seems kind of straw man. I don’t know a single developer that thinks “googling stuff means you’re not a proper engineer.” Perhaps this is a reference to the interviewing process. Tests are a different thing, though. I’ve been on practical technical screens where you can google, because the test was about building a larger system, and they don’t care if you don’t remember this or that API…
Isn't that what a whiteboard interview is? Proving you can do things without google or else you aren't a proper engineer? (For the record I disdain whiteboard interviews as the accepted metric for testing one's ability)
For example, if your solution involved generating all permutations of a sequence, and you didn't remember how to do that efficiently, I would let you make up a black box function that just does it. We might come back to this later in the interview, but I'm generally uninterested in whether you memorized an algorithm for it or remembered how to call the standard library function that does it.
That said, if you make up the black box function, I might dig into why you designed the function signature the way you did, and I'd do that to see whether you can talk about code design from a "other people will read and use and debug your code" perspective.