The best programmers are the quickest to Google

Be the quickest to Bing or DuckDuckGo; They are less spammy

Let use an analogy in education:

A professor in college might allow the class have an open book exam, however you still see a number of people who might not pass that exam. Why? Well, there were two kinds of people in that class:

1. The smart ones who actually know the material. 2. The others who know nothing about what had been taught so far in the class.

The students in the first category will pass the exam but the second crowd perform poorly, because even though the book is in front of them, they don't know what to look for, especially in a timed test.

So the way I see this is that googling will help those who already have knowledge of the programming concepts, not those who have no idea of what they are trying to implement at all. In reality those who can use google to get what they want can also figure it out without google, even though it might take longer of course.

Before I really started coding I worked in electronics (designing mixed-signal design kits at the semiconductor level) and I remember I used to judge programmers by how much "better" at google they were than me. Since I've switched over and become a full-time coder (and co-founder which is a whole different exercise) I have become far better at searching for solutions to my problems than I was in the past. That being said I don't think it's the fact that I default to searching that makes me a good programmer. I think it's like some of the other comments have mentioned, the ability to filter what information is useful or not quickly and then apply and test the useful information so that you do not have to re-derive every action. This has led me down a rabbit-hole a few times where I would be testing different solutions when just building it myself would have been much faster, but overall I definitely think it is part of what makes me work at the speed at which I do.

I'm reminded of Mathematics from college. When first learning something it's difficult and simply seeing the solution won't improve your ability to recognize it. But once you figure it out once, you may not immediately remember how to apply it when faced with a similar problem, but recall is very quick because your brain has already wired the pathways of understanding.

Many of the best programmers I've seen google stuff. So do many of the worst I've seen.

The difference is the former won't type a single statement without knowing what it does first, while the latter will just copy and paste something that seems to work, regardless they understand it or not.

The last time I came across some copy-pasted code that was giving some troubles, and after asking the owner of that code what some stuff did, he was unable to tell me, after claiming it was just fine, because the code he copied was from a trustworthy source. This, I guess, is a bad practice of how googling things should work.

Just what I thought!

One thing to point out: there's a fine line between what is and what is not repetition. You may/will find a tool that's perfect for what you want to do sans one or two features. Your ability to adapt that tool to exactly what you want so you don't have to repeat the 99% of things which are already finished is important.