> To be fair, I'm not a web developer
Kind of a non-article. Could I make an outdoor irrigation system, fix my head gasket, or anything else complicated without doing some research?
Kind of a non-article. Could I make an outdoor irrigation system, fix my head gasket, or anything else complicated without doing some research?
> To be fair, I'm not a web developer so I'm not entirely shocked by this. I only have the itch (and time) to throw together a small web app about once every 6 months.
A better rebuttal is, do you make a [small] outdoor irrigation system or fix a [simple] head gasket "once every 6 months"? I added the adjectives to better compare to his stated "small web app".
I think it's reasonable to expect someone who "throw[s] together a small web app about once every 6 months" to be able to do it without googling, but it isn't how software development is taught. When studying something to master it you start with the basics and do them over and over until you understand them. We don't (tend to) do that in software development, I think for two primary reasons: 1) there's more "important, urgent" things to do and 2) things change so quickly that probably half of what you learn today will be unused in a year (of course if you learn the very basics those rarely change, but I'm talking about the things we all know change so frequently, but were good decisions at the time)
"Or even deeper, does an over-reliance on documentation indicate a lack of critical expertise that will ultimately result in considerably lower job performance?"
I don't think so, and I don't know why relying on documentation would be bad.
In a more general sense even for making a todo list app I'd imagine the fundamentals aren't changed even across frameworks e.g. of when adding a todo it needs to be added to some sort of a list.
Of course, it shouldn't be that Google specifically is necessary - just some literature or reference source (i.e. consulting with someone).