So when you google a problem and it leads you to a code snippet that solves it that just happens to be OSS, you immediately scrub your brain and pretend you never saw it and instead instead come up with your own completely independent solution after the fact?
Google usage is outright forbidden for work in institutions that care about intellectual property rights, so the brain scrub issue is just arguing at the wrong level.
If you're googling solutions around you're already not taking intellectual property seriously enough to care about what happens after you lift ideas around.
Maybe I live in a bubble, but the likes of Google/StackOverflow have been part and parcel of a developers toolbox for many years now.
And in any case I wonder how that is enforced. Eg, Someone goes home in the evening and visits github, learns a new trick and comes into the office the next day and implements it.
Can you name these institutions? I am surprised to hear that some institutions would prevent devs from viewing e.g. documentation of the APIs they are using or academic papers about algorithms for computing the multiplicative inverses of 64-bit integers, if they accessed those things via google
This is interesting. Is the internet completely cut off? Do they have internal libraries of documentation for third party stuff they are using (paper? digital?) Do you have any example institutions, or what domain they are working in? Thanks.
A concern, which I think is legit, is that it is quite easy for someone with a strong presence in search, web advertising, analytics and mobile to puzzle together what a company is investing in based on the aggregated research and web access from known locations
Perhaps in your circles, but that's certainly not something I've encountered over a 25 year carreer.