It depends on how hard you push the envelope. The closer you get to doing something no one has ever done before, the more likely you are to be in your own.
Of course, any time you're doing something no one has ever done before, it's prudent to consider whether you should.
I've made it two decades in IT and related fields by searching for answers using Google. I accidentally took my laziness, love of automation, and ability to Google and became an SRE. Then I accidentally became a senior software engineer because the director on that side of the house liked my initiative and was sure my skills would translate. I protested but got a substantial bump to do it.
I'm failing upwards by abusing stack overflow and search engines.
"There is no point in reinventing the wheel" is my favorite saying when it comes to things like this.
If something has been done over and over again, there is no point in doing it yourself from scratch. It wastes time, money, and effort that could be spent on creating something new.
Humanity's greatest strength is being able to add to the previous generation's knowledge base, too!
If we had to relearn how to do the same things in the same way, in every generation, we would still be in the stone age...
When I manage folks, I expect them to steal if its already been done and especially if it's been done to death.
As someone who worked in tech support and a sys admin role, yes, and thank you. I would say 90% of all issues and problems I had were either solved or pointed in the right direction since 2006, the year I started.
Googling problems certainly helps but you still need enough knowledge to define the problem, Google it, and implement the solution.
I get the impression that a lot of posted solutions are from people who actually spoke to high level tech support for various hardware/software because how else would they know things like what obscure registry key with a very arbitrary name to add?
Google search results have become so bad i barely use it today.
Its even better to use chatgpt. You have to take every answer with a grain of salt but usually it can give you a few options and give you resources to work with.
Google search sucks ass. The amount of times i do NOT find what im searching for is way too high
Im full time IT, a huge chunk of my job was learned through google. My current position looked incredibly different before we had phones and could research everything on the fly. I feel bad for tech's who didn't have access to research tools like we do now.
Well, you need the basics of software development to start with. But sure, I'm not going to make my own implementation for every problem I come across. That would be insanity and a colossal waste of time.
However, people googling or using ChatGPT to create code they do not understand themselves, are just cargo cult programming, and it will bite them in the arse/ass (delete as applicable).
Oh sure yeah let me just start fact checking by subscribing to every kind of scientific journal, calling up various libraries and universities to check relevant studies, and ask lawyers and legislators every single time somebody says something questionable or puts something misleading on a label instead of using a search engine.
I use Google at work on a regular basis. It's taught me a lot about using powershell to get stuff done faster, how to use rox and ios cli more efficiently, and ChatGPT taught me how VTP works because sometimes Google isn't enough when you've no idea what you're doing in the first place.
After a while using duckduckgo for everything, my work browser was hooked to Google, and when I went to use it the results were shit, and the ads were just overwhelming. Reconfigured it to duckduckgo.