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You make a fair point. But i want to be honest and say the negativity is not all prejudice. I have been involved with hiring of devs in India and Europe, and from what i've seen the ratio of bad to good candidates is far worse in india than europe.

I don't know why this is the case. My suspicion is that far more Indians get into IT for money or status. People who go into IT for those reasons almost always are mediocre to poor devs. Regardless, i don't see this google training program improving the ratio.

>Regardless, i don't see this google training program improving the ratio.

I don't understand. Training is training. If you don't think training improves the ratio of good to bad developers, then why do we have all these training programs in the US like Coursera or Stanford's Open Computer Science Courses? The reason we have MIT Open Courseware is to train and improve developers...thereby improving the ratio of good to bad developers. That logic holds true for any training program. The Google Training Program should improve the ratio as well.

I totally agree with you on this.

The kind of IT devs usually associated with mediocre work are typically not the ones who are going to end up taking advantage of these courses. My experience is that they are typically just interested in doing the bare minimum needed and don't have to curiosity needed to improve or learn new things. Forget about them.They form a small percentage of the 1.3 Billion population and unfortunately are the ones most people end up interacting with when outsourcing dev work to India. This is unfortunate.

However, on the other hand, there is huge generation of college age kids who look up to famous founders and CEOs (Zuckerberg, Nadella, Pichai, etc.) and aspire to start companies and write kick-ass apps. Traditionally, it has been difficult to get access to good quality training material in India for a variety of reasons: lack of internet connectivity, lack of good CS curriculum and teachers in most colleges, lack of maker spaces and maker culture, and so on. I am not making excuses for those people, but when you have a 512 Kbps internet connection, watching Google IO sessions on YouTube is a struggle.

Growing up, I was lucky to have access to all resources I needed, but a lot of other people weren't. My hope here is that this sort of training schemes coupled with the internet access Google is rolling out across the country really helps people who really want to learn. The program mentioned in the article: "NPTEL" has a good track record of making quality content available to universities and libraries.

Tl;dr: I am painfully aware of the bad experiences people have on outsourced projects. This program is going to attract a different crowd of people.

When I see the word "training", I take it to mean that the people taking part learn just enough to get started, but not really enough to make something of quality. That part requires more self-sacrifice, more learning, and some people do that.

But not everyone.

Something I get discouraged by is when coding schools lure students by talking about salaries, because the people who are really motivated by that oftentimes don't invest the extra time to get good. They see a quick paycheck, and they signup, they put in just enough work, and then they take off. Maybe they'll put in the extra work because they're still motivated to either make more money or because they genuinely like coding, but this doesn't always happen.

In highly industrialized economies I've noticed a lot of people give up when they realize that their training doesn't give them enough to make the money they were hoping for, unless they decide to put in more self-sacrifice. If you live in an economy where the US dollar has more purchasing power, then the money that comes out of basic training might be enough to satisfy people. They got their quick paycheck. They don't have to learn the extra stuff, the stuff that makes you really good.

That's where my negativity stems from. I'll admit, just a theory, one that I've come up with to rationalize patterns when people hire me to fix outsourced projects. There's nothing inherently wrong with any country and the software developers that work there. It's a universal human desire to make money relatively painlessly and the disparities between wealth in different economies.

>When I see the word "training", I take it to mean that the people taking part learn just enough to get started, but not really enough to make something of quality. That's where my negativity stems from.

You could say this very same thing about Coursera or MIT Open Courseware. And you're right, people in Coursera sometimes learn just enough to get started but nothing more. That's just the thing, "Learning just enough to get started" is not an Indian Specific phenomenon.

People dropping out of training courses happens all over the world and that's normal when Educating and Training. If Google's "training" gives you a negative feeling, then your negativity should be directed towards Coursera and MIT Open Courseware and other Training Institutes, not just Google's Training Courses for Indians.

That's why I put all that other stuff in there. The problem is that in more industrialized economies novices quickly figure out that their skills aren't really worth much and that they'll have to get much, much better in order make more money. They might just do that, especially if they also like programming, or they'll just give up and do something else.

In less industrialized economies, or at the very least economies where the US dollar has a lot of purchasing power, the "novice rate" is actually quite a lot, so much that unless you really like programming you might not have any desire to get better, you just settle for a novice skill set, continue working for overseas contracts for $8 an hour, and produce low-quality Android apps that become the ire of people like me.

Also, people generally take Coursera and MIT Open Courseware for intrinsic reasons. I took a course on Coursera a while back about logic because I found it interesting. Very few people would take a course on logic to make money off of it. By contrast, more people taking a short Android development training take it for extrinsic reasons. They want to make money. Again, in countries where the the US Dollar has a lot of purchasing power compared to the local currency and $8 an hour to make an Android app is worthwhile, there's little incentive to improve and get better if you're primarily motivated by the money factor, unless you're especially interested in making even more money, otherwise you'll likely just settle.

I agree with most of your points here. But regarding malware, even without malicious intent, if the large amounts of apps are made without much thought to security, number of malwares and security risks would definitely go higher

That's why there's Secure Developer Training and Security Awareness Training.

Seems like the big concern from everybody here is Indian Malware Apps. To get closer to better security, I think now would be a good time to encourage Google to offer Secure Android Coding Courses too.

But why would we assume not a lot of thought will be given to security? I think it is up to Google to make sure they design the course in a way that emphasizes good security practices.

It's not a little sad, it is racism (even if unconscious).