Yeah, I'm not sure how effiecient that google-vs-memorising is. I do know it is incredibly polarising - say developers need to memorise and you get hammered by people passionately proclaiming that memory is dead.

But there are - as an aside - very real health benefits to having memorised the work. You're making less decisions (ie "what to google" and "is this useful"), which means you have way more willpower and energy for your daily life. Which is, of course, largely anecdotal but I think goes a long way to explaining traditional developer body types vs those in, say, finance.

(It's not like finance people are "less academic" than developers, for example).