> You obviously don't know anything about the French academic system and grandes écoles. Or you are being hypocritical. Well i obviously know some, i've done t

> You obviously don't know anything about the French academic system and grandes écoles. Or you are being hypocritical. Well i obviously know some, i've done two master degrees in French university, one in Computer Science and one in Sociology, and i've found the GP's post to be pretty accurate. So please feel free to post a real rebuttal, i'm ready to argument at least as to why i think french university education prepares very badly to anything practical and creative that isn't in the domain of pure academia. This for example : > are in completely different schools from the people with actual know-how , who get forced into consultancies mainly, to write Java enterprise code for the rest of their lives. is actually pretty much 95% true. When you get out with a french comp-sci degree, you are presented with the following choices (by your professors and the businesses linked to the university) : - Either go into research - Either go into very specialized industrial work (high safety embedded systems, mission critical components) - Either go into big consultancies doing Java (Cap Gemini and such) This does not arise from maliciousness, but only from the fact that those are the three main areas in which there is work for comp-sci students in France. The area of consumer oriented innovative enterprises, be them big or small, is pretty much nonexistent. The courses in my university (which is supposedly the second best french university for computer science) are quite difficult, some of them are even good (most notably in the domain of logic/semantics, programming language research and the likes), but most of them are either: - Highly theoretical, based on subsets of domains that have seen no massive practical use in decades, still being taught because they are the teacher's PHD subject. - Supposedly practical, but using outdated/horrible/both technologies. For example, i have had two introductions to web development at University, one using bash scripts and C (no kidding), by some sort of mad teacher who thought reimplementing libC with more ternaries was the way to go about life, the other using such things as JSP/Spring Framework, obviously designed to target those students who were gonna go in the "Enterprise world". Both made me want to kill myself (figuratively). On a variety of more "academic" subjects where we are actually supposed to have some experts here in France, be it systems programming, embedded systems, highly parallel programming , the quality of the courses when compared to those of top american universities (which are as of now widely available for free on the interwebs) is so low that it is really, truely depressing. This is obviously a complex problem, and there are no black and white, but if you are really able to argue that there is no truth to the statement of the GP, then you are the one who doesn't know a lot about french university, or being hypocritical.