Nor have I seen this "punch every hiccup into google" approach. Most errors are things that (a) you've seen before if you have any significant experience and (b) have a pretty obvious cause if you simply read the error message and look at your code.

Sure you might lean more on Google or SO if it's something you haven't seen before, or it's something deep in a stack that isn't code you actually wrote. But as the noob eventually learns when he thinks he's found a bug in a runtime or compiler that thousands of other people are using every day: No. It's probably your code.

I suppose there are people who never advanced beyond the "type (or copy/paste); run; google the errors" loop, but I've never seen anyone with more than a year or two of experience doing that very often.