‘India developers exceptional, but talent shortage issue is structural’
NEW DELHI : India is home to the second-largest developer base for GitHub, the world’s largest platform for storing, hosting and sharing code. Data shared exclusively with Mint by GitHub revealed India to have over 11.4 million individual developers on the platform, while over 440,000 Indian companies also host and share their code through the platform. All this contributed to nearly 30 million code repositories on GitHub by Indian users.
In an interview, Mike Hanley, chief security officer and senior vice-president of engineering at GitHub, spoke about how, despite these figures and the advent of generative AI, the shortage of cyber security talent remains acute in India and globally, what the platform is doing to tackle growing cyber attacks, and why training professionals is not the only way to address the talent shortage. Edited excerpts: We’re trying to make sure that developers everywhere, with an emphasis on open source, achieve better security outcomes with us. To do this, we give free educational resources and training on security.
Our security lab spends a lot of time finding vulnerabilities in open-source software and then partnering with communities that build that software to improve it or resolve any bugs. We’re also closely associated with the Open Source Security Foundation (SSF). Then, we’re further improving the security of our own platform—we’ll require everyone contributing code on GitHub to use two-factor authentication, which is one step to increase the security of the overall ecosystem.
India has a massive developer community—the largest for GitHub outside the US, with 11.4 million developers. However, the vast majority of them are not security experts. This talent shortage is a major challenge
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