"The best programmers I know understand how to architect and build large projects piece by piece. They can focus on the macro because don’t get hung up in the pieces. They know how to use Google to find solutions fast. DRY."
I agree with the first and second bit and strictly speaking the third. That is, when students first watch me code they're surprised both that I'm looking up this-or-that ActiveRecord method and at the speed with which I do it. They assume expert programmers have a book of magic spells they've memorized, so to see what I haven't in some ways makes it more magical.
What am I doing, then, if not memorizing every last little thing? What makes me a "better" programmer?
The key to becoming a non-beginner are the first two bits, not the third. It's developing that filter experts have which separates relevant information from irrelevant information. Lots of beginners use Google in a backwards sort of way, having been trained to "look for the solution." Google is like the great universal answer key for them.
It can't be about memorization, then. Being an expert is more like having this amazing compression algorithm at your disposal and we can evaluate very quickly whether some piece of information is compatible with that compression algorithm.
It's made worse by the fact that they see experts do it, sometimes. Or worse, that experts tell them, "I use Google all the time, you should, too." But Google is worse than nothing if the beginner finds code, copies it blindly into their project, and shuffles characters around until it does what they want. They are robbing themselves of the opportunity to abstract out common patterns, recognize similar problems in different guises, and generally setting an impossible bar of having to memorize too much.
Lots and lots of students have been trained to see software development as THAT.