If I had to do my day job without being able to google stuff.... it would take 10-100 times longer to get anything done.
What I learnt at Uni is still partly valid, but significantly out of date. On a day by day basis I have to deal with problems that weren't even defined a month ago using technology that didn't exist a year ago.
Yebbut, there is little real fundamental change; it is mostly variations on a theme with some semantic sugar and a colour change.
Software language examples: C# is Java, Delphi is Pascal, Go's channels are from Hoare's CSP, Objective-C is Smalltalk.
Hardware examples: the myriad different MCUs, all programmed in C.
The real painful ones are the ones so new, or so industry bespoke that you can't google them. Sometimes they don't even have proper documentation and your only course of action is to read the code.
Those are the fun ones. There you have to think of the fundamentals, and apply techniques first used in other domains.
Example: to reduce noise I needed a narrowband filter, so I used a technique described 20 years earlier to make a filter with a Q of 4000 using 10% components.
Fast forward 30 years, and always wanted to revisit that N-path filter to do something new. I was
most irked to find Tayloe had already got there with his mixer
This is to say that you can't learn everything in advance, what you need to have is a good problem solving strategy and be expecting to learn new things each and every day.
Precisely.
The really painful part in my trade is that resource managers take this a few steps too far. It's is extremely unpleasant to be assigned to a project as a consultant, the customer being charge $1000+ a day for your expertise when... in all reality, you didn't even know what technology existed until your manager told you what your next project would be.
Not so precisely
. The customer is paying for your expertise in bringing previous experience to bear. Part of that experience is knowing how to rapidly become the local expert in the tech
and the customer's problem domain. (Plus being able to spot the customer has asked for an inappropriate solution because they asked the wrong question.)
Remember the old joke about the technician that repaired a car by hitting it with a hammer[1]. The customer objected to the £10 invoice for one thwack. The technician agreed it was wrong, and changed it to "Thwack: £1. Knowing where and how hard to thwack: £9".
[1] I've done just that, to a starter motor