[incision]

>"When is the last time you heard of a system administrator writing down problems on a whiteboard as opposed to asking a colleague or Googling the answer?"

Once you move beyond roles which are effectively operations, maintenance or been-done implementation to anything that can be called engineering you'll start to face problems for which there are no canned answers.

>"It's not the 70's any more, people rarely solve problems on whiteboards and paper."

This has nothing to do with era, it's a matter of scope and scale. When you have problem that is big / complex enough that it can't be reasonably solved by a single person a whiteboard is invaluable in laying things out and thinking them through.

>"They solve them on the computer, sometimes through knowledge and their skill-set and other times through luck and Googling."

Where do you think all that helpful information on Google, or anywhere else actually originates? When the folks at Google were in the process of engineering GFS do you think they just Googled "chunk replica placement" and hoped to luck into a StackOverflow post on HDFS from 10 years in the future?