There is nothing wrong with googling for a solution. In the workplace its better to quickly find a solution to a problem that is already solved than spend a week trying to figure out something that you could have discovered in seconds.

You think profesional software developers "just know" the answer to everything. Nope.

For a prime example look at John Carmack and all the stuff that has been attributed to him:

Did he invent the fast square root? Nope
Did he invent BSP trees? Nope
Was he the first to use PVS? Nope

Did he invent the Doom3 shadow algorithm? Nope

Did he invent Mega Texture? Nope

All these things were already invented several years before he decided to use them. How did he discover them? Through research.

OK ok but somebody must have invented them in the first place well yes they did but for the most part it wasn't something they just thought of. A lot of computing solutions come from academia where people spend years working on a very small subset of problems as part of their phD. These then get published and forgotten about until somebody researches them and finds a use for them.

Obviously he did the research unti he fully understands the solution but, still it isn't like he just dreamed the answers up in his sleep.

Both.

When at work, when confronted by a problem my first thought it ALWAYS "I wonder if anyone has had this issue and solved it already..." and away to google I'll go to see if that's the case and to learn from something someone else has already solved.

The 'learn from' part is pretty key; if you find a solution, copy and paste it and don't take in why it worked then you've learnt nothing. If you take a moment or 7 to think about the solution, how it works and how to refine it to your situation then yay! experience!

And that's where the ability to solve 'new' problems comes from; experience.

Most seemingly new solutions will always have a seed in an existing solution to an existing problem which someone then thinks about some more, applies knowledge and experience gained over the years to refine the solution and create something new.

Nothing is created in a vacuum and all new ideas are feed from old ideas and as you gain more knowledge you'll find yourself doing this naturally.

Problem solving itself is nothing more than looking at something and then taking it apart so that one big problem because two smaller ones, which in turn become two smaller ones and so on. This gets easier with experience and practice as you get use to it and solve problems.

The key point is 'research' isn't a dirty word.

everyone googles nowadays... its just as much a basic skill now as problem solving.

Get good at it just as you train you programming skills or other skills. Some of the best solutions come from taking something someone else did and improving it.

Its what engineering was for hundreds of years! Even geniouses did it.

You will give up, but it will haunt you. Then one night, while falling asleep, the solution to the problem you've already cast aside will snap into your mind.

There really isn't a better feeling.

It's basically this.. Or at least for me it is.

I'm in a similar situation, I self-taught myself programming and never went to college or university. I've barely read a programming book and have watched a few basic programming tutorials. Whenever I try to write a program I nearly always find myself googling for solutions to problems or looking at other peoples code. And that's basically how I learned to program.

It's taken me many years to finally build up the confidence to apply for a job as a full time programmer but I finally got there earlier this year. My day job now consist of writing web based gambling games using a bespoke Java API (Reminds me of an XNA style framework but for gambling games). But because it's bespoke though there is nowhere to turn when a problem comes up which I can't solve.

Instead I sit there for hours, sometimes days... Hell, sometimes even weeks staring at a notepad document where I've written down all of the information I currently have available and what information I need, trying to work out a way to turn A into B. Eventually it will click into place and you'll solve the problem, although it feels like it at the time, nothing is impossible. There have been plenty of times in the last 6 months where I've been sat at my desk, head in hands, thinking up a way to tell the project manager the game is impossible and cannot be completed.

Eventually when you hit that solution though, it builds your confidence and blows away any self-doubt you may have about your skill as a programmer.

Lots of good answers here. I especially like Glass_Knife and phantom's.

Another thing you can do is read just the overview of the solution, and try to work out the details yourself, but with a chicken exit if you need it.

Also, don't be afraid to solve the same problem more than once :) Sometimes when you have a large and complex challenge, you just have to dive head first into it and make a big mess of code. Then refactor and it looks a little better. But with your deeper understanding of the problem, you might be able to approach it from a different angle and come up with a more elegant system overall.

A good example for me is side scroller collision detection with slopes. It seems so simple, and often it is, depending on how many cases you want to handle. But it can get really complicated if you want to support slopes steeper than 45 degrees, sloped ceilings, not having off-by-one problems between left and right slopes, colliding the center of your rectangle with the slope but corner when standing at the edge of a solid tile, etc. I finally managed a system that does everything I want, but it's not quite the level of elegance I want to reach before writing an article series on it (because all the articles I've read don't solve it completely). So one more iteration, one of these days :)