[toast0]

Being able to do the work with reference materials is fine. Maybe if you spend all day on stack overflow asking questions and waiting for answers, not that great. But it depends on the level of work; for me, a lot of my real work problems either have no search results or lead to only reports of questions with no answers. Formal documentation is typically absent, although sometimes there's insufficient or misleading documentation instead. Someone who can't figure things out in these conditions wouldn't be able to do my job.

In my mind, faking it is learning what to say in interviews to get the job(s) without having the skills and ability to do the work.

That said, when I interview, I'm really looking for can they describe the output of a program before the write the program, and then can they write the program that works as they said it would. Also, the program should have a loop inside a loop, because nested loops happen all the time and there are too many candidates that can't deal with them.

Candidates that can't manage a nested loop or can't write a program that does what they said it would immediately prior to starting to write the program but somehow managed to get into my interview are faking it in my book. Some candidates clearly are just having a bad day, and some are probably having a bad day but not as clearly.

References are hard because a) some people fake those b) fear of litigation means many companies prefer to only provide start and end dates and maybe eligibility for rehire. Also, the modern world means nobody answers their phone so this process becomes very asynchronous.