Why do experienced programmers still google basic things?

Because the skill was never memorization, it's knowing what to search for and how fast you can find it.

A 2018 survey by Blind (an anonymous workplace app for tech employees) polled over 10,400 people and found that 58% experience imposter syndrome. Broken down by company: Amazon 64.5%, Facebook 59.3%, Microsoft 56.2%, Google 56%. One Salesforce employee in the survey said they still felt this way after 14 years as an engineer.

Here's the mechanism: junior developers watch a senior colleague solve a problem quickly and assume they memorized the answer. What they don't see is that the senior developer has hit this exact problem before and knows precisely where to look, not that they never needed to look at all. The real difference between junior and senior isn't how much you've memorized; it's how quickly and accurately you can find and apply the right information.

This mirrors something interesting from AI research too: the gap between confident-sounding answers and actually correct ones. Just as language models sometimes guess confidently instead of admitting uncertainty, junior developers often see showing uncertainty (googling in front of others) as a weakness, when recognizing "I need to look this up" is actually a mature professional skill.

Longer breakdown here: [Full Article]