Not only is "Googling" one of my most important job skills, now that I'm doing professional services, my entire job basically consist of "Learn product ${FOO} faster than the customer's employees can." Which of course primarily consists of knowing what to search for, how to find it, and how to interpret and use what I find.
A few years ago... Okay over a decade ago 🤕 Google offered a free course on "googling" with a certificate for completion. You're damn straight I put that on my resume. Of course they've disabled half the tricks they taught us but now.
When I interviewed junior devs for my team, I had zero theoretical questions, and only two coding questions which were basically code that had to be debugged, and once it was running, for them to implement some minor things that I asked them to implement. I said I don't mind if they googled, I only wanted them to share their screens while they worked, so that I can see how they worked and how they googled/adapted the answers to their code. I interviewed over a dozen people ranging from freshers to 4 yoe, and you should see how terrible they were at googling. Out of all them, only one fresher came close to being good in the interview. Even '4 yoe' devs who 'spearheaded' various projects sucked at basic python and googling.
Knowing when to cut your losses swallow your pride and ask for help is legitimately an incredibly important dev skill. I've met otherwise decent developers that could disappear in a hole for a month on a simple problem that anyone else on the team could help them work through in a few hours because they didn't want to look dumb.
Actually finding something on Google often requires some knowledge and the application of the right strategies and tricks.
Holy shit, this guy only Google searches with {google:baseURL}/search?udm=14&q=%s
Definitely a senior.
Imagine the dude brings his homemade pizza with glue as lunch
Lucky guy. Tolerance for calling a spade a spade is a big green flag.
I put "Simple Green" on my resume skills section. Cleaning isn't a huge part of the job, but I knew they used that specific brand across the industry.
The interviewer mentioned it with a laugh. I got the job.
I moved a guy forward in an interview process once who had literally zero corporate experience at all. It was for a senior website engineer position, and the guy had somehow never had a job before in his life at like 45 years old. He played in a band for a while, and was a stay at home dad after that. I moved him forward because he was a really interesting guy, he seemed passionate about creating things, and his technical aptitude was passable and could be improved. He didn't make it past the other stages of the interview process, but I was definitely ready to give him a chance.
he can find all the memes, all the lost media and all the classified documents
