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42 (school)
- cnasc 8y agoSome previous meta-discussion about a reddit post that made some very critical claims about 42: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189670
- travmatt 8y agoI’m a current student at 42, myself and my fellow students all had a pretty good laugh at much of their comments. We didn’t really see an accurate representation of our school, and much of it came across as a bitter student who wasn’t accepted. For example, there is a cat at the Paris campus and the students are asked to ignore it and not pet it. That guidance turned into the ‘rule’ that if ‘the cat touches you, you fail’. I promise the school doesn’t have a secret failure cat. I’m referring to the reddit link, not the HN comments.
- mygo 8y agowhy not pet a cat? what did the cat do to them? is 42 anti cat? just kidding. see how easily conspiracy theories form?
- solarkraft 8y agodamn cat haters.
- mygo 8y agoI once wrote a purely academic article about election map data visualization and after it got picked up by Fast Company it was amazing how some people in the comments were convinced that it was written to further some sort of political agenda. Just sitting there reading that made me go wow, I wonder what I’ve been lead to believe from the outside looking in that is just flat out unfounded
- avip 8y agoPet-based discrimination.
- magoghm 8y agoMy son is a student at 42 (in Paris) and he's very happy to be there. It seems that the system they have is a better match for his learning style than what you would find in a more traditional school.
- gjmacd 8y ago"The candidates must be between 18 and 30 years of age (18 - 45 in Silicon Valley).[14] No previous diploma is required." Age discrimination at its best. Cap it at 45? How many people over 30 (45 in the US) are trying to retool and get educated on programming?
- baoha 8y agoNo comment about the age cap but I've witnessed a lot of people (especial those with H4 visas) who are over 30, coming here without programming background, going to local CalState schools for an MS in CS/Stats, most of them were able to find job after graduation. The high living cost in the Bay Area is the motivation, it's difficult to raise a family with only 1 income
- travmatt 8y agoAs another poster verified with information from the actual 42 site, there is no age ceiling for prospective students for the 42 Silicon Valley campus.
- baby 8y agoThis school is for free, and to educate the next generation of students, why do you have to complain?
- solomatov 8y agoBecause there're laws against age discrimination in US.
- ahuibers 8y agoThe older copy of the US site at https://web.archive.org/web/20180206011840/https://www.42.us.org/42-admissions-overview-requirements-process/faq/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180206011840/https://www.42.us... is very clear: "I AM NOT BETWEEN THE AGES OF 18 AND 30. CAN I COME TO 42? No. While we do not have anything against those who are over 30 years old, when opening a new location, we have decided to concentrate our where they can be the most efficient and where we have a great deal of experience." On the current site this is changed to: "You can apply to 42 if you’re older than 45, but please know that most students here are younger and that Intensive Basic Training is tiring." Hardly encouraging. The french site http://www.42.fr/ http://www.42.fr/ says "ouverte à tous et accessible aux 18-30 ans" (18-30 only) Draw your own conclusions about age discrimination here. You are free to apply...
- throwawaycanada 8y agoToo bad I'm over 30.
- travmatt 8y agoThere’s no age restrictions for the Silicon Valley campus, you’re more than welcome to apply.
- gjmacd 8y ago45 is the cap.
- travmatt 8y agoI’m typing this comment as I sit inside the 42 Fremont campus and I’ve personally seen students here that have to have been older than 45.
- vladimirkon 8y agoMost likely they are younger than 45, but didn't age well :) I work with guys who in their late 20's but look way over 45...
- travmatt 8y agoThey were significantly older than 45, by over a decade, closer to two. There’s 0% chance.
- Joky 8y agoWhy not look at the source to get the right information? https://www.42.us.org/42-admissions-overview-requirements-process/admissions-requirements/ https://www.42.us.org/42-admissions-overview-requirements-pr... https://www.42.us.org/42-admissions-overview-requirements-process/faq/ https://www.42.us.org/42-admissions-overview-requirements-pr... > I AM NOT BETWEEN THE AGES OF 18 AND 45. CAN I COME TO 42? > Yes! We are looking for learners who are motivated. In establishing the school in the US, we focused first on the age range we’re familiar with, then expanded to include high school, and will continue to expand. It’s important to develop a program that supports the success of students while still challenging them. You can apply to 42 if you’re older than 45, but please know that most students here are younger and that Intensive Basic Training is tiring.
- unknownkadath 8y agoIt sounds like an interesting experiment, though I agree with other posters about the age cap. A school named 42 that would not accept Douglas Adams as a student, were he still around. Ha!
- EZ-E 8y agoThis kind of discussion will end up being the typical (French) disdain between people learning engineering in the public schools v/s the ones learning in these "practical teaching" private schools and vice versa. There are good engineers in both, both have different approach to teach which fit different people. Both do generally good in the private sector after they're done with it. As usual the people graduating from public schools will say the private graduates don't have the theorical foundation, and the private graduates will say the public graduates don't have enough technical skills when they graduate. In reality the decent students will pick up the theory from the practical projects and vice-versa. If that matters, I did Epitech, which is similar-ish to 42 and all the people that graduated with me have decent positions and are in high demand by the job market. Some of them in big name companies. This kind of private schools are a good alternative for people who don't fit in the public education by letting them just do practical projects with some direction and let them pick up the theory from there. Some people are really good self taught hackers but would otherwise drop out in typical education, but they can shine in these schools. I've met many.
- baby 8y agoMy opinion is that you have a close division of very good students, good students, average students, mediocre student, etc. in both the public schools and the more private ones. I'd say that it seems like it's easier to make it as an average/mediocre person if you're doing epitech, 101, 42, etc. If you're very good, it seems like you'll do better with a more beefy theoretical background
- EZ-E 8y ago> I'd say that it seems like it's easier to make it as an average/mediocre person if you're doing epitech, 101, 42, etc. You could just as well learn all the theory by heart, do not know how to use it in practical situations, forget it after the exams and pass just fine in most public schools as well. If you're bad and not willing, you're gonna be bad, no education will save you
- baby 8y ago
- __initbrian__ 8y agoAny 42 silicon valley grads here on HN? How was it?
- tmacro 8y agoI graduated from 42 in April. I moved here with no prior work experience in tech, and got a developer job in a little under a year. The curriculum is mostly C based which can be a little tedious, but you do learn programming from the ground up.
- fyrn 8y agoNot a grad yet but I'm level 15 of 21, currently doing an internship at ford. As for 42 it's not for everyone, you have to be a self starter and you have to be driven. I came to the school because I wanted a place that would help focus my studies, I think that if you can relate to that you would do well here.
- gbersac 8y agoI am a french 42 graduate. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot of usefull stuff. I am now an IT programmer since 2 years in a selective IT company. Everything is going well.
- baby 8y agoThere is 101 as well: https://www.le-101.fr/ https://www.le-101.fr/
- nikisweeting 8y agoSounds somewhat similar to https://www.recurse.com https://www.recurse.com
- baby 8y agototally different. 42 is a real school with a, I believe, 3-year program.
- vageli 8y agoWhat do you mean by a "real" school? Are they accredited and give degrees?
- baby 8y agoI'm not sure if they give out a degree, but they have a real program that you must follow, and exams.
- hycaria 8y ago42 delivers no degree, and you can do it as fast as you want.
- nikisweeting 8y agoI'm not saying it's the same, I'm saying they share a similar ethos: "The school does not have any professors, does not issue any diploma or degree, and is open 24/7. The training is inspired by new modern ways to teach which include peer-to-peer pedagogy and project-based learning."
- baby 8y agostill completely different, at recurse you are free to choose whatever you want to do, whereas 42 has lists of exercises, challenges and exams that you must go through.
- 0xb100db1ade 8y agoI have gone to several hackathons at 42. It is quite a nice campus, really well maintained. It's much bigger than you'd think and the supervisors are happy to let visitors explore
- valw 8y agoHaving interviewed a bunch of 42 graduates, my main issue with 42 is that it doesn't teach their students to think about what they're doing, encouraging them instead to rush to the keyboard and emit as much code as they can as if programming for the last day of their project. This seems to resonate well with the culture of piscines at 42. To me, this is as silly as training Biathlon athletes to not even aim before they shoot. So far, I've always ended up not recruiting the candidates, because they would have made a mess of the codebase in no time, bringing negative net productivity to the team (more so than most junior candidates I've seen). And this was for jobs in a startup! I wish 42 would teach them the necessary insights to program sustainably - that's where teachers and mentors are indispensable, and that's the rare skill most companies are lacking. Anyone can pick up tutorials and read manuals on their own. Make them developers, not eternal coding beginners. I'm not asking for an academic or scientific focus, just a good philosophy of programming in general, the kind of which you see in SICP for example. Unfortunately, 42 does not have a monopoly on producing short-sighted developers in France, by far - that's the case of most "learn to code in X days/months/years" programs.
- liotier 8y agoDevelopment requires analysis and programming. Some people are both analysts and programmers - they are the elite, not the norm. I can manage large business requirements, I write functional specifications and negotiate them with users, I plan technical architecture... And then I'm happy enough with programmers who need hand-holding at every step - anyway my telco employer has long stopped having budget enough to pay contractors who understand our business. Pure programmers may be short sighted but they provide the value some of the market needs, for people such as me who are decent analysts and exceptionally bad programmers - learning the latest Javascript framework is a dirty job but somebody's got to do it !
- valw 8y agoEven without the burden of understanding business requirements, it still takes programmers a fair amount of analysis to program without making a mess that will kill their ability to make progress; learning the latest JavaScript framework does not help at all in that regard. I'm glad to hear you manage, but your employer may want to consider hiring fewer programmers and paying them higher wages - I know a lot of companies would benefit from that.
- tripue 8y agoThere is a bunch of successful companies led by graduate from theses kind of school. Check out vente privée CTO. Another example could be the core team that developed docker that was from there as well.
- valw 8y agoSure, but this doesn't tell us anything about the role 42 played in these successes - there's also a fair number of successful entrepreneurs without any higher education, should we infer from it that no education is the key to success?
- hycaria 8y agoHonestly I'm unsure about this (except if you're a fresh high school graduate). Sure you will probably land a job in tech but considering how easy it is now for ANYONE to land a job in tech, is such a school really needed ? Resources online are plenty (and actually 42's main way of learning), so learning material is not the problem. If you're already in the workforce, you can get yourself a training through the employment agency, or even better an apprenticeship. Consulting firms hire science graduates and train them to be developers. I went that way, switched for a small company after a few months where I am better tutored. Some friends stayed in consulting and still improve. Sure the pay is low in consulting firms, but it is immediate and you build professional experience directly instead of wasting 3+ years. Doing 42 when you already have a degree sounds like a waste of time to me. I guess it's fine if you're 18 and need guidance though. But I'd still prefer prepa and engineering schools over 42...
- namdnay 8y ago> except if you're a fresh high school graduate That's their main source of students, no?
- thomasbachem 8y agoSomewhat related to this, we founded https://code.berlin https://code.berlin, an accredited university in Berlin with strictly project-based, interdisciplinary and self-directed 3-year Bachelor programs in Software Engineering, Interaction Design and Product Management. We're in our 2nd year now, with 230 students from more than 40 nations. We've partnered with 42 US for student exchange last summer, and it was an awesome experience for our students who went there.
- icebraining 8y agoYou should post it to HN! I see it has been posted once before, but that was over a year ago, it's perfectly fine to post again.
- thomasbachem 8y agoThanks, will do :) I'll just wait until November when we reopen applications for next year.
- zapita 8y agoI am very happy about this trend of project-oriented, deferred-tuition programming trade schools. So far I know of: - 42 (France and Bay Area) - Lambda School (online) - Holberton (Bay Area) - There is also Epitech (France) which is the "ancestor" of both Holberton and 42. They don't defer tuition, but have the same project-oriented, TA-intensive curriculum. It's still early and all these schools have their strengths and weaknesses... But I think this is a positive trend. It makes tech education more accessible to a lot more people, and can produce quality engineers. It's definitely much better than the horrible coding bootcamps popping up everywhere, that charge 5 figures and leave you completely unprepared for a software development career.
- thomasbachem 8y agoAbsolutely! There's also - Make School (Bay Area) - CODE (Berlin) [I'm one of the founders]
- baby 8y ago101 in Lyon
- wutschkef 8y agoI'm a student at the Paris 42 campus. It is not true that the average 42 student lack theoretical understanding. We may not take a semester long course in compiler theory for example, but we do manage to build our own shell scripting interpreters and pick up enough compiler theory to define a grammar, build a parser to produce an AST and then interpret it accordingly. The same goes for other theoretical foundations of programming. I understand that the traditional way of hiring engineers and teaching them practical programming skills on the job is well established. But you would be surprised how good some of our students are both in theory and practice and how few guidance they required in reaching their level of skill. If you have any questions about the curriculum or our work here in general, feel free to contact me!
- ElFitz 8y agoQuite honestly, most companies don't care about one's compiler theory knowledge or ability to build shell scripting interpreters, nor should they.
- LukeB42 8y ago> Quite honestly, most companies don't care about one's compiler theory knowledge or ability to build shell scripting interpreters, nor should they. Right. Like how you don't care about the persons' physics knowledge when hiring an architect. /s
- ElFitz 8y agoNo. Like you don't care about one's ability to make some concrete when hiring an architect. It's nice to have, might be essential on some specific projects. Usually won't matter.
- v_lisivka 8y agoI'm sorry, but if architect cannot make some concrete, i.e. he doesn't know basics of his profession, what you expect from him? A house? Yes, you can hire him, but that will cost you lot of money. There are tons of examples of cheap architect work, e.g. collapsed bridges in the Western Europe.
- monkeynotes 8y agoI don't know how anyone has the energy to write code for 50+ hours a week for a whole year. Surely you have some burn out with that as your base-line cadence. I have no doubt some younger people, competitive alpha minds would take this in their stride, but I worry this culture of hyper competitiveness permeates into employment. When this stuff is accepted as 'work ethic' and normalized you tilt toward what some asian cultures are experiencing today - producing overworked unhappy individuals. Personally I don't think it's great to brag about how hard you work. I don't think it's ok to be proud of bootcamps (although 42 School explicitly says it's not a boot camp which is a little Orwellian). People should be proud of being healthy, getting enough sleep, eating well, having social interactions, learning, cultivating well balanced meaningful lives. To truly be a school of the 21st century we need to do away with this culture of stress. It's killing the best of us.
- roblabla 8y agoDisclaimer: I'm a 42 student. I agree with this sentiment so damn much. When I joined the school, I was very afraid that such a rhythm would lead me to a fast burnout. Thankfully, there's no pressure to do any kind of crazy hours. The school is open 24/7, and there are no deadlines for projects or whatever. This is a two edged sword: on one hand, there's an incentive to stay at school as long as possible, and put in some crazy hours. On the other side, though, it creates a lot of flexibility for student. If you need to take a breather, you can totally put in less hours, or even totally stop going for a while. If you need to do some odd hours, like working a night schedule, that's also possible. Of course, I have put in some 50+hr in a week sometimes,while hacking away on a project. But i have also clocked 25hr some weeks. This absolute flexibility is a real stress relief.
- 0xferruccio 8y agoFor anyone that is considering attending the school I recommend reading also some criticism: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/91bjlr/school_42_is_a_borderline_cultopinion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/91bjlr/sc... That being said I met some super smart people from 42 that had built extremely interesting and technically challenging projects! For example a first year student I met had built a 3d rendering engine in C without using any external library.
- alain94040 8y agoThis is at least the second time someone posts this link. I read it the first time, and found it not convincing: that person failed to get in, is telling a bunch of second hand stories that are probably wildly exaggerated. Not much to see there...
- mattferderer 8y agoThis is cool to see as I once owned the domain school42.com because I wanted to build something similar but more focused on allowing teachers to do 1 on 1 teaching in a large group setting. Ideally I felt if teachers could see all their students work using something like Web Sockets, they could visit 1 on 1 either digitally or physically when a student was having trouble. Since this was a digital platform, you could set up simple triggers to determine if a student might be struggling. I dug up some really old notes that referenced my reasoning for the name. "42 is the number used to define the meaning of life, learning is also arguably the meaning of life. It also sounds like school for 2 (teacher & student). This will hopefully help one to one learning."