Surely the programming languages, libraries, and platforms you were using had documentation. It's not the point whether you are using www.google.com, mycompanyintranet.com/wiki, or yelling across the room to ask a question.
By the way, the three attributes you just stated are what makes anyone good at almost anything.
I've been contributing to the Rust compiler in my spare time, and needless to say documentation is quite lacking. In fact, the Rust source code itself and git diffs are probably the best documentation available since everything is still changing.
In this context, you don't have the luxury of using Google for examples of common actions.
I'm also an undergraduate security researcher. In this position, you are at the forefront and Google doesn't help. Reading papers helps a little, but there's always the chance that someone else beats you to the punch and publishes first (happened to me 4 months ago).
You've worked at a startup? Documentation is usually the last thing people do unfortunately, at least in any kind of useful way. Sometimes there was documentation, but when only 10 people in the world are using a language there ends up being undocumented behavior or things that you can only discover when it happens to you or you ask the guy around the corner who created it...
edit Also wanted to say there is a huge difference between being able to Google and "Copy-Paste" a solution vs Googling the source documentation and figuring out the problem. We definitely could not have copy-paste programmers.
Heck, that attitude about documentation is everywhere, not just startups. It's just that good documentation is one of the things that separates the good shops from the bad shops.
By the way, the three attributes you just stated are what makes anyone good at almost anything.