&quot;You wouldn&#x27;t evaluate a chef&#x27;s ability to cook by depriving them of saucepans, why cut off Google?&quot;<p>Depriving of recipe books is perhaps a better analogy? I think depriving of saucepans would be like hiding the keyboard!<p>That actually works pretty well, even doctors are expected to look things up if they get stuck. Why should programmers be any different? SO is extremely useful for funny edge cases in software that someone else spent an afternoon trying to figure out.