Code I've seen at an (at the time) very well known startup horrified me. It must have been written by people with exactly this mindset: "Why spend time learnin

Code I've seen at an (at the time) very well known startup horrified me. It must have been written by people with exactly this mindset: "Why spend time learning all this useless background information when I can just find the answer on google in 10 minutes". It was obvious that people just cobbled together dirty workarounds that they must have found somewhere on the internet. They used runtime hacks to circumvent limitations in a library API, even though the library was developed by someone else at the same startup, and the runtime hacks were not necessary if the developer had any clue about what they were doing. Sometimes you get stuck, and searching the web can help you get unstuck. But the problem is when people just search for the solution to EVERY problem they encounter and never learn the basics because they don't want to "draw out the project". (Addendum: I'm not dismissing the internet. You can find good information on the internet. But it takes time. The problem is that people take shortcuts, and instead of learning everything they need to know, they just google for the answer to their specific problem because it seems more productive in the short term. Buying and reading books will take longer than copying an answer from Stack Overflow, but it will not take longer than learning sufficiently in depth about a topic by reading blog posts, documentation, etc)