This, for me was a bit surreal and strange, because it took a long while for me to arrive at the same conclusion but from the complete opposite end. I came to

This, for me was a bit surreal and strange, because it took a long while for me to arrive at the same conclusion but from the complete opposite end. I came to computers from electronics and for me, Data Structures and Algorithms was (to an extent, still is) black magic with Don Knuth the presiding head wizard. For me, compilers, filesystems and OS internals were all sort of deep dark places that I wasn't equipped to handle. On the other hand, banging out a shell script, spewing perl, or reciting python was just a matter of figuring out the right set of incantations ...not really hard. I learned html, css, js, a lot of python and was (/am) happy to just 'get-things-done' with these skills. I looked at people who could talk about BigO, concurrency, monads and the rest as the 'privileged' -- I could never be /that/ good. And yes, I thought all of this was relevant to software engineering (as opposed to science) and that I would never get there. Fortunately, I no longer think this. Thanks to all the resources available online these days, the limits, I know now, are not inherent nor are imposed by ability to understand, they are imposed simply by time for learning and practice. So, I am still learning and yes, in that sense, the art of googling well can make you a better programmer -- irrespective of what you know today.