I knew a guy who had an amazing command of the Bible. Now, that might not seem relevant, but hear me out.

Pastors, priests, etc., were all amazed at how quickly he could point to a reference in the Bible and make a passionate argument. He didn't go to school to be a priest. He wasn't taught how to read the Bible, at all. He had no training. Yet, there he was, consistently, but gently stomping learned priests in arguments.

He read the Bible far less than any of them. Do you know what his secret was? References. Just references. He would know part of a passage, and then look it up in a search engine, and find what he was looking for to make his point.

Albert Einstein did the same thing with books. "Never memorize something that you can look up."

Even Senior devs reference w3schools, google, stackoverflow, stackexchange, etc. Even industry veterans of 17+ years. Why? Because it's impossible to know everything. But you should know what to look for, right? And you do, right?

After observing him, and asking about his brilliant command of his favorite subject and finding out how he did that, I started using the same reference tricks to get my job done and shortcut a lengthy memorization process. Although by now, I have a lot of experience with programming to the point that I generally don't need references most of the time. Note that I said most of the time?

I still want to be sure something is correct. Maybe I forgot about a syntax feature. Maybe I forgot a concept. It doesn't matter: I can reference it because I know exactly what to look for.

There's nothing wrong with using references to get your job done. Everyone does it. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you. If a company doesn't want you to do that, they're looking for a millimeter needle in a gigantic haystack, and will be greatly disappointed when their senior dev takes to Google or Stackexchange.