[new_guy]

I think it's made a lot of people overestimate their competence and overvalue their 'skill'.

They think being able to Google/SO something is the same as knowing it. Give them a laptop without internet access and most 'developers' wouldn't even be able to get it setup nevermind write 'hello world' from scratch.

[mooreds]

Haha, I'd put it slightly differently. It has changed what skills are important to software development. It used to be knowing things cold or being able to look them up in a book was critical (having the right book being a precursor). Now, it is knowing how to search, knowing what terms might be used, and knowing who to trust that is more important for many types of work.

In some ways, it's like the transition between oral history and written history. Both were ways of storing knowledge, but one was far far easier for more folks to access.

Of course, as a dev, it's also important to be able to experiment and test, and the internet has changed that by making computing power easier to access (whether heroku, cloud providers, or even just things like requestbin).