You are not a failure if you look something up

I have Stack Overflow, TechNet, MSDN and Google tabs open all day every day at work.<!-- more --> I have a bunch of productivity aids in my IDE to help me tell the computer what I intend for it to do faster. Moving around project files. Autocompleting variable names and class definitions. Automatic linting, parsing and type-checking. Finding errors I've made before I even know I've made them. Am I ashamed? No. It makes me more productive! Being good at a technical job isn't about how much shit you can memorise and learn by rote - that is what computers are for. It's about knowing what questions to ask, how to ask those questions (who taught you how to use a search engine effectively?), where to find the answers to those questions, and how to piece together the answer to your specific problem from seven disparate and conflicting sources of information. The value that you bring is the ability to think in ways that computers cannot, ask logical questions, and find elegant solutions to problems that computers cannot solve.

The thing that humans are good at (complex logical and multidimensional reasoning) and the thing that computers are good at (handling and manipulating masses of instructions and data very very quickly) are (at least for now) largely seperate abilities. I'm going to say this again: you are not there to be a memory bank. You are there to teach a computer to solve problems that it cannot solve on its' own. The computer is really, really good at helping you store, recall and manipulate vast amounts of information. Don't be afraid to use that to your advantage, and especially don't let anyone tell you that you are inferior because you have learned to work smarter instead of harder.

(The content of this post comes from a comment I made on reddit.)