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> Also I don't understand why you say that the students graduating from grandes écoles are technically incompetent. I believe that this is a false statement re

> Also I don't understand why you say that the students graduating from grandes écoles are technically incompetent. I believe that this is a false statement regarding the domains of physics, mathematics, or general engineering, but i think the level of engineers out of grandes ecoles in comp-sci and programming is really far from stellar, being easily surpassed by students out of universities. I actually had a few courses at Telecom Paristech : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9l%C3%A9com_ParisTech http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9l%C3%A9com_ParisTech The level of the exams was quite low compared to anything i had at university. The course itself was as most of the courses i had at university, quite good technical and theoretical content, very bad pedagogy, and utterly terrible practice projects. A quick glance at what is available at top american universities convinced me that this is a real problem in French comp-sci education. See thoses courses for an example of what i mean when i think "good practice projects": http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-828-operating-system-engineering-fall-2006/assignments/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero

Wilya 14y ago
The demand for people with good applied computer science skills in France is very low, from what I have seen, so that's kind of understandable that there are no courses for that. On the one hand, the pure coding and enterprise tasks are given to people from lower tier/more specialized schools, who are less expensive but mostly lack the advanced comp-sci knowledge. On the other hand, people in pure research fields don't care about your applied skills.
gommm 14y ago
Anecdotally, I went to a Grande Ecole studying Computer Science: INSA of Rennes and I was an exchange student at RIT in rochester. The level of the classes and exams at RIT was much lower than what I had back in france (and a lot of exams had rote learning at RIT, I remember questions like: Which companies drafted the openGL specifications? which is beyond useless and stupid.) The examples of practice projects you listed for OS and compilers are similar to what we did. We also had a fourth year practice project that lasted all the year in a 6 students team and which was really interesting: we were working on a cross platform networked Tarot game with an expert system implemented in Prolog. It was really fun :-) Of course, it also depends on the grande école or university you go to and I'm quite sure that for example MIT is much better than RIT for example.
- julien_c 14y ago
  INSAs are known to be really good schools for Computer Science though – probably much better than Telecom ParisTech.
carlob 14y ago
> I believe that this is a false statement regarding the domains of physics, mathematics, or general engineering, but i think the level of engineers out of grandes ecoles in comp-sci and programming is really far from stellar, being easily surpassed by students out of universities Or by their peers in Physics, Mathematics and GE. I know it's just anecdotal, but the French high tech companies I know in some level of details were mostly founded by non comp-sci majors (I'm thinking of Criteo, Vision Objects, Dassault Systèmes…).

Wilya 14y ago

The demand for people with good applied computer science skills in France is very low, from what I have seen, so that's kind of understandable that there are no courses for that. On the one hand, the pure coding and enterprise tasks are given to people from lower tier/more specialized schools, who are less expensive but mostly lack the advanced comp-sci knowledge. On the other hand, people in pure research fields don't care about your applied skills.

gommm 14y ago

Anecdotally, I went to a Grande Ecole studying Computer Science: INSA of Rennes and I was an exchange student at RIT in rochester. The level of the classes and exams at RIT was much lower than what I had back in france (and a lot of exams had rote learning at RIT, I remember questions like: Which companies drafted the openGL specifications? which is beyond useless and stupid.) The examples of practice projects you listed for OS and compilers are similar to what we did. We also had a fourth year practice project that lasted all the year in a 6 students team and which was really interesting: we were working on a cross platform networked Tarot game with an expert system implemented in Prolog. It was really fun :-) Of course, it also depends on the grande école or university you go to and I'm quite sure that for example MIT is much better than RIT for example.

julien_c 14y ago
INSAs are known to be really good schools for Computer Science though – probably much better than Telecom ParisTech.

carlob 14y ago

> I believe that this is a false statement regarding the domains of physics, mathematics, or general engineering, but i think the level of engineers out of grandes ecoles in comp-sci and programming is really far from stellar, being easily surpassed by students out of universities Or by their peers in Physics, Mathematics and GE. I know it's just anecdotal, but the French high tech companies I know in some level of details were mostly founded by non comp-sci majors (I'm thinking of Criteo, Vision Objects, Dassault Systèmes…).