You are definitely right about this, unless you have constant access to senior developers and mentors - It requires a lot of effort on the part of the 'learners

You are definitely right about this, unless you have constant access to senior developers and mentors - It requires a lot of effort on the part of the 'learners' / 'trainees' to level themselves up. But once again, large subgroups have effectively converted them to world class workforce without any external interference at all. Reid Hoffman visited Shenzen last year , and made some really interesting observations. I'll try and add a link to his article, But I think the essence of his trip was - How small groups built ,tinkered , hacked, learnt and became technicians by themselves ( in often cases even without a college degree). On top of this they also layered , other cost optimizations , spoke English and were self made entrepreneurs. I have seen similar trends in other parts of the world too, though not at the scale of Shenzhen . In the City I come from , a certain suburb was well known for Automobile repair work - Most of them could disassemble and reassemble entire cars , and sometime construct a car from disparate parts ! This eventually turned to a smaller version of 'Orange County Choppers'. Its really hard to create/recreate such environments,but may be thats what Google is trying to do here. Or May be they are trying to build something similar to the 'Manufacturing' examples I gave above.