13 ms·

This French tech school has no teachers, no books, no tuition

236 points by joubert 12y ago

vmarsy 12y ago
I think it's a great initiative! It might work, it might fail, but at least it is trying! I hope they will manage to produce well rounded graduates, and not just monkey coders. > France already has a reputation for creating great engineers (in software as well as in many other fields). Engineering schools[1] however have a lot of teachers, students have more than 35 hours of class a week. The tuitions are already very low compared to US schools (and there is already no books). Their process is a lot different from what École 42 tries to do. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%A9coles#List_of_graduate_engineering_schools_.28grandes_.C3.A9coles_d.27ing.C3.A9nieurs.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%A9coles#List_of_gra...
- djulius 12y ago
  In my opinion the goal (as with Epita/Epitech) is to produce monkey coders. What is at least sure, is that these school give a very limited background in cs theory, which is very difficult to overcome to go beyond the monkey coder stage. Because of the shortage of coders, big french consulting companies (Atos, Cap Gemini, ...) hire since decades graduates from every domain more or less related to science/technology and give them a six months training (in the best case) before sending them to the clients. So I'm not that surprised that such a school will be successful as long there is a coder shortage. When the next bubble blows, these graduates will probably be the first to be layed off.
  - mickeyben 12y ago
    I was graduated from Epitech and it's right the background in cs theory is very poor but the goal isn't to create monkey coders. The goal of this school and by extension of 42 (the school mentioned in the OP link) is to create real hackers, people able to learn by themselves. Most of the projects are coding projects right but it's oriented in a way that forces you to learn all along the way if you want to succeed. Learn from internet, books or your peers. RTFM is the motto of the school. You'd be surprised by what the students are able to achieve. If that matters some Epitech students work in very successful companies (fb, twitter, google or microsoft) and the Docker founders were in Epitech.
    - song 12y ago
      I come from a French grande ecole but from my experience, I prefer people coming out of Supinfo and Epita/Epitech than people fresh out of a French Grande Ecole. The problem of most people coming out of grande ecoles is that they lack experience, after a few years on the job, they can become great, but newly graduated engineers from Grand Ecoles are not very efficient at the beginning on average. On the other hand, I've seen great candidates from Supinfo and Epitech who learned a lot of the CS theory on the side by themselves and were really good... I think learning CS Theory without a good practical background is actually wasted a bit and that more Grandes Ecoles should try to get students to have more practical experiences which would help them connect the theory to actual situations they've had.
      - agumonkey 12y ago
        Did you see a difference in ability to abstract and or learning speed ?
        song 12y ago
        No I didn't, but then I do have to say it's not a huge sample size (6 people altogether 3 from Grande Ecoles, 2 from Supinfo, 1 EPITA) but the effect of lack of actual practical experience and slowness due to that was flagrant for the Grandes Ecoles. It was for Rails web application which I have to say requires somewhat less pure CS theory (although it is very useful to reason with).
        agumonkey 12y ago
        Fair enough, that said I feel it's a waste of resources to allocate someone from a 'Grande Ecole' to low level things like a rail app.
        song 12y ago
        I wouldn't say either that a Rails app is low level. Developing a rails app that can handle really high level of traffic does need a lot of specialized and deep knowledge.
  - patrickaljord 12y ago
    > In my opinion the goal (as with Epita/Epitech) is to produce monkey coders The creators of Docker and React Native come from Epita/Epitech, so it does produce a few gems :)
    - pol0nium 12y ago
      Docker : from Epitech ;).
  - woah 12y ago
    Sounds like you're somebody who doesn't have much to be proud of beyond a diploma.
  - mtourne 12y ago
    Typical french elitism. Part looking down at "lesser schools", part afraid of a model that might be different and yield better results. Docker comes to mind, as a silicon valley success story founded entirely by monkey coders.
    - jrbancel 12y ago
      It is not elitism. I know several developers from Epitech that are very very good at what they do. However, they can't be compared with graduates from the top grandes écoles, simply because none of these grandes écoles focus as much as Epitech on training developers. It is a broader education. As a result, graduates from grandes écoles can work pretty much everywhere and most of them don't actually work in tech (usually finance, management consulting, etc...). Epitech graduates can't. Graduates from Epitech, or 42, are very far from having the same ability with mathematics and quantitative sciences in general. That being said, it probably doesn't matter since most tech projects don't require such skills.
      - peferron 12y ago
        The top grandes écoles have the best math/physics students coming in. These students are obviously likely to also be the best math/physics graduates coming out. The only way that wouldn't happen is if the grandes écoles brainwashed their students into stupidity, while Epitech and 42 had a time-distorted super saiyan training chamber. That doesn't say much about the quality of the curriculum.
        jrbancel 12y ago
        > That doesn't say much about the quality of the curriculum I agree. However, this thread is not about the schools themselves, but their output, the graduates (c.f. parent and GP: "produce monkey coders", "yield better results").
      - mtourne 12y ago
        By saying this you're implying that it is a school that teaches you only one skill, versus teaching you how to teach yourself new skills. Or that the people who attend such school don't have the mental structure to do so. Are you considered more apt to be a leader, or qualified to be a finance quant (even if you never trained for it) with a top school or your resume ? Yes you absolutely are. Also "most of them don't actually work in tech". Yes, that. Programming is considered a dirty job in France by most people from grandes ecoles. They would all rather be architects or consultants. It sounds better on the business card. But someone needs to actually do the job. And this is why there are only tech services companies, but nothing close to a Google.
  - feedjoelpie 12y ago
    Getting paid to write code before you've taken CS 101 seems far preferable to taking out piles of student debt, does it not?
    - djulius 12y ago
      France doesn't have such thing as student debt, higher education is close to free in the public system(tuition <1K€/yr)
  - rifung 12y ago
    No need to say "monkey coder" instead of just coder or programmer. My school's undergrad curriculum focused very heavily on theory and I appreciated and thoroughly enjoyed it. I think I've had a much stronger theoretical foundation than most I've seen with similar experience. On the other hand, I don't really feel like any of my jobs have really required that knowledge whatsoever. I certainly don't see a problem people learning any theory necessary as they go if they are just planning on working in the industry. I certainly appreciate the theoretical background but I really would have a hard time believing having this theoretical knowledge is necessary to becoming more than a "monkey coder" whatever that means. It's not as though these people are going to a research university or planning on doing research; they are going to learn to program and maybe gain the skills to find a job, and that's certainly what they are getting.
  - pol0nium 12y ago
    Beware of the confusion between Epita and Epitech. These two schools are very different. Epita is an engineering school and it is absolutely not focused on producing programmers. The school teaches electronics, physics, OS, embedded systems, compilers, management, security,... _and_ programming. Epitech, is not an engineering school and is focused on creating programmers (but still provide some other courses).
  - realusername 12y ago
    For me, it's the complete opposite. Coding is like learning a music instrument, it's 10% theory and 90% hard try-and-try-again practice to figure out how things works in real life. Nobody would suggest that you can learn an instrument by sitting in a class all day studding music sheets. But suddenly for programming, people create absurd degrees where you only have theory courses.
Dralon 12y ago
(French Engineer inside) The project looks awesome obviously. What you need to know out of the context with it's director (Xavier Niel), is the guy is an ace of communication. Looking a little more into details and feedbacks from people who did the school, it's a VERY different story. I would highly doubt anything that comes to the communication about 42. Probably the vision is achievable, I'm not sure it is by this school.
- baby 12y ago
  > Looking a little more into details and feedbacks from people who did the school, it's a VERY different story. I'm curious to know where are those people who came out of42. The school opened like 4 years ago right? So the first graduates must have been last year. If you have any stories to share I'm curious :)
  - negrit 12y ago
    Actually there are no graduates yet.
  - xeope 12y ago
    > If you have any stories to share I'm curious :) I did 42 for 1 year. Now I'm working as sysadmin. During the first year, we had projets with limited time (depends on the difficulty, from 1 to 6 weeks). We had 2/3 projets at the same time. This school is kinda like Epitech. The staff is composed by students (I was one of them, I joined them after 3/4 month of learning at 42) and people who came from Epitech (sysadmins, 'teachers', web dev). Yes, there is a kind of 'teachers'. They create the first videos, the subjects (mostly taken from Epitech too :)) But this year, there was a big change. Now student can create subjects, videos. The projects are not limited in time. We are not working for 100hours/week, but a lot of people are at school for more than 50hours/week. This depends on their faculty to learn and their motivation. But... There is some bad points for 42. There is no labs. There is no books. There is no English class (as you can see with my poor english :) ), no math class, no French class (and a lot of people really need it....). When you see people reading the man pages in french, you feel sad for them. Whe you see people not able to do some math, you feel sad for them too. And, seriously, a library or some labs for the students can be a good thing. 42 is a cool thing for people who have not the 'baccalauréat'. I dont have this degree but thanks 42, now I have a great job. If I had this degree, my choice for a school might be something like ENSIMAG / ENSEIRB, but definitly not Epita / Epitech. Btw. > In fact, 40 percent of École 42’s students haven’t finished high school. Others have graduated from Stanford or MIT or other prestigious institutions. Why someone from a prestigious school would like to come to 42 ?
jarnix 12y ago
Yes, and it's a terrible school ("citation needed"). There are also other schools (like ETNA for example) where the teachers are almost non-existant, your teachers are the students of last year, (you actually pay for this, it's not public schools). Engineering schools do not have a lot of teachers in France, I don't understand where you get that from.
- jarnix 12y ago
  Thank you for the downvote. Sorry but I am just telling the truth. If you have any counter arguments, please tell them, I would be happy to learn something about the tech schools in my country.
GhiGt 12y ago
Nothing revolutionary at all, its manager (Nicolas Sadirac) had created EPITECH in 1999 (I did this school). The program is exactly the same. The only things which change is that Ecole 42 is free and takes only the 3 firsts years of EPITECH instead of 5.
- yodsanklai 12y ago
  Doesn't prove anything but Google Paris organized a programming contest last month and 42 along with all Epitech perform very poorly https://sites.google.com/site/hashcode2015/results https://sites.google.com/site/hashcode2015/results
  - patrickaljord 12y ago
    Some of the top schools on this list only let in people who are already extremely good _before_ they even get in the school (École normale supérieure for example), 42 accepts almost anyone. If people getting into a school are already very good before they get in, how do you know they got better thanks to the school? They would probably have scored very high at any school. I think, if you consider that the job of a school is to educate people, then if 42 can turn someone with little education into an average to great programmer, that's a great accomplishment. In comparison, Ecole normale sup turns extremely bright and knowledgeable people into great programmers, not such a great accomplishment IMO.
    - yodsanklai 12y ago
      > 42 accepts almost anyone Well, that's not what the article says. "Last year, 70,000 people attempted the online qualification test. ... In the end, 890 students were selected for the school’s inaugural class" But I agree that it's difficult to judge the quality of formation considering that the student populations are different. But still, I don't see how how throwing programming challenges at CS beginners with no supervision can be better than university professors.
      - palunon 12y ago
aikah 12y ago
Well the teachers are(will be since it's the first year) the students. Several engineering schools do that in France and abroad. It's a good PR for Niel.
r0naa 12y ago
FWIW I have heard terrible things from people studying there. While it looks good on paper, the sad reality is that it's basically a code monkey factory. Also, I don't really think that this kind of trade school are relevant in France where access to education is low.
uniclaude 12y ago
This is a fantastic initiative, and like a lot of businesses built by Xavier Niel, I hope it leads to positive changes in the industry. This said, what I would be worried about with this system is how long it will take for the employment market to adapt to this/those schools. When it comes to jobs, French companies, especially large ones, have a really strong bias towards applicants from well known and somewhat elitist public schools, no matter how efficient those might actually be at their jobs. Unlike the US, France doesn't really have a strong and major software industry competing for raw programming talent, so developers have nowhere near the salary, status, or lifestyle they could expect in places like SV or NY. Very few companies have a real incentive to hire a great programmer over a good one, which might reduce the efficiency of a school that focuses on training very good developers without giving them the access to the prestige of the (also free) traditional public schools. It will be interesting to see how salaries and career paths available to programmers trained at École 42 will compare with those hired after they graduate from École Centrale Paris. Nevertheless, I look forward to hire from this talent pool.
- yodsanklai 12y ago
  > French companies, especially large ones, have a really strong bias towards applicants from well known and somewhat elitist public schools, Not only French companies, but also banks, hedge funds, companies like Google and so on... I was saying that in an other comment, but recently Google Paris organized a programming contest. All teams in the top ten came from top schools (mainly ENS, but also ECP and X) whereas 42 performed extremely poorly. There's a reason why employers are biased towards elite schools.
  - patrickaljord 12y ago
    42 performed poorly because it's only been in existence for a year so they have no graduates yet. Only people who've been learning for a year. Time will tell if this school will produce great coders.
    - p4bl0 12y ago
      The people participating in the Google hashcode contest for any school do not have graduated from that school yet.
yodsanklai 12y ago
The story that Xavier Niel (school founder) is trying to tell is that there are many bright students that didn't fit in the traditional/oldish education system, but they could reach their full potential in this new school. I don't buy it. First, there's a large panel of CS formations in France, most of them virtually free. It goes from highly selective schools "grandes écoles", to universities or undergraduate programs that anyone with a high-school diploma can attend. There's room for many different student profiles there. Then, I don't see why it would be such a progress to get rid of the teachers and the books, are they that bad that they prevent the students from improving? > The students are given little direction about how to solve the problems, so they have to turn to each other — and to the Internet — to figure out the solutions. Usually, this is what professors do when they are too lazy to cook up a real project.
- p4bl0 12y ago
  Your comment made me realize that for instance at ENS (one of the French topmost Grande École) we had professors but the courses were focusing on theory, and for example there is no courses on a programming languages (there is a compiler / programming language course, but it is focused on the theoretical aspects of things, what I mean is that there is no C or C++ or Python course, you are just supposed to pick it up yourself if you need it). Meanwhile, we also had projects that we had to figure out by ourselves. For instance in the first semester of the first year, there is a course that explains theoretical stuffs that are supposed to have a relation with hardware (like 2-adic numbers [1]). The project for this course consists in programming a watch that displays time. But we have to program the watch in an assembly language that we have designed ourselves. And that asm has to execute on a processor that we have designed ourselves. And we have to write the processor code in a hardware/netlist language that we have to design ourselves. And we have to write ourselves the interpreter we will use for that netlist language. That was what we were told to do, with no additional instructions. Some students learned C by themselves for that, some other C++, some other OCaml… And all of them learned or reinvented how to design memories, or a CPU (for instance, me and a friend decided to invent a single-instruction processor, just for the fun, we got it working but it was rather slow compared to other who decided for instance to learn how to implement a simplified MIPS). All this to say that there is absolutely no incompatibility between having professors and teaching (partly) by projects. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_number
S4M 12y ago
Seems like another initiative to disrupt the traditional model <good university> -> <good job>, after the MOOCs and soon Star Fighter. I think it's a good thing to disrupt prestigious universities that hire on credentials, but France is not exactly the country for that since education is mostly free and admissions (at least in engineering schools) tries to be more meritocratic. EDIT: disclaimer: I did an engineering school in France.
eva1984 12y ago
So basically, it is a big/free internet cafe?
exceptione 12y ago
I think it is fantastic to make many programming hours during your education. However, I am wondering if these students would learn the computer science fundamentals which are usually found in more or less dry books. Programming analysis, logic, fundamentals of programming language implementation etcetera. You can't say: look on the internet and find the relevant papers in all those fields and synthesize the theory by yourselves. That would be highly inefficient, a problem we tackle with education. If you make the comparison to Harvard you aim for more than educating people to become good/ exceptionally effective developers in my understanding.
- bsaul 12y ago
  You're right, they don't ( i've interviewed people from the epitech, which was created by the same people). That's the one big shortcoming of the curriculum. They're claiming to teach the next zuckerberg or page, but they forgot that those two people have a strong general scientific background. Yet, they do create people that are truely amazing at coding.
  - mathattack 12y ago
    Is it possible to pick up what they're missing later? Or is it something like Calculus or Accounting, where if you don't pick it up by college, the odds of picking it up later are negligible?
    - andrewchambers 12y ago
      It's not the odds of picking it up, its the need or willpower to do it. Most people just get by with what they already know and don't bother to try and learn anything new after a certain age.
    - bsaul 12y ago
      I don't think it's impossible, but if you have any desire or love for abstract reasonning and theory, you'll probably feel a bit sad eating projects after projects of low-level C programming. The kind of people going out of this school will most likely build OS implementation stuffs, or security appliance, or VM or compilers. But probably not a new compression or distributed concensus algorithm, unless they already have a personnal interest for the fields.
metasean 12y ago
>The only requirement is that they be between the ages of 18 and 30. I'd estimate that well over half of my bootcamp cohort was over 30.
- desdiv 12y ago
  Now that you mention it, isn't this just age discrimination? I would get in serious legal trouble if I posted an ad saying "Hiring software engineers; ages 18 to 30 only." Doesn't the same apply to schools?
smsm42 12y ago
It sounds very novel and interesting, but for me for example I know I need _some_ structure to learn something. It doesn't have to be a formal university degree structure, but some kind of arrangement of material, mentorship, progress tracking, experience sharing, feedback, etc. is necessary for me. I kind of doubt that giving a person with no programming/CS experience Google and a task like "write a concurrent distributed high-performance database system" would lead to a good outcome. There is a lot of trade lore, experience, knowledge of what works and what doesn't, etc. which is better passed by a teacher in an carefully constructed narrative than by random discovery by an uninitiated person. But it is interesting to see what comes out of it, maybe they prove me wrong.
- Mitsu0 12y ago
  "some kind of arrangement of material, mentorship, progress tracking, experience sharing, feedback" There is (more or less) all that in 42, thanks to the "peer to peer" approach.
  - smsm42 12y ago
    Mentorship from peers may lead to a "blind leading the blind" situation. I'd prefer some experience/knowledge transfer involved.
tienthanh8490 12y ago
Anyone knows where to find some sample projects from this school ?
- pandark 12y ago
  http://wolf3d42.tumblr.com/ http://wolf3d42.tumblr.com/ http://raytracer42.tumblr.com/ http://raytracer42.tumblr.com/
lazyant 12y ago
> Yet École 42 is harder to get into than Harvard If you select the very best few, you could get them into an empty barn, or have them walk the Appalachian Trail or whatever and the "school" will have great success measured by what the smart motivated students accomplished.
- azinman2 12y ago
  Maybe? The question to me is a) how well do they learn things and understand the deeper principals such that their understandings generalize? B) what do they end up learning/creating? Is it like the mit media lab where they're encouraged to innovate 5-10 years out, or are they building stuff that's existed for a long time like Ray tracing? C) if everything is team based, do the smarter/type a ppl end up doing all the work or does everyone contribute equally enough to learn? D) is there any kind of mentorship? The stuff I've learned from my mentors across school was never what was being assigned in class; understanding that there are things that you would never think of as entire fields needs guidance for the not yet educated Sounds like a cool concept for self starters however.
  - zipeldiablo 12y ago
    a) projects are here to teach us notions, for exemple the first minishell we had to code was there to teach us execve and fork (basics to code a shell). b) first we are building stuff the way the school wants, basically you have to do a programm that do certains things (like recoding a wolf3d for exemple) and you have to follow the coding norme of the school, you are free to do it the way you want as long as you follow the rules for the project. But there is also free projects, during 6months you can do what you want the way you want as long as it is a real project and not 6months of vacation. c) not everything is team based, except for rushes and some projects, all projects are individuals, we learn together yes but we don't code all the time together. d) You don't have one mentor, every student can be your mentor, the concept of the peer learning is exactly what you describe, talking to other students to get help, another approach of the projects, learning new things, etc.
- eloisant 12y ago
  Actually I don't think it's harder to get into than Harvard. They have many, many applicants because they don't put any restriction. You can apply even if you didn't go to high school. Also, they have no tuition but neither do the public universities in France ("Grandes Écoles"), and the most selective and prestigious schools are public. So while the "no tuition" thing is impressive for a private school and may sound like a dream for Americans, it's not really rare in France considering the choice you have with public schools. Finally, not really related to the way they teach there, but here's the director (same guy in the picture on the article) spanking a girl in a classroom during off-hours (nsfw). http://www.19h59.com/WTF/10238_Le-directeur-de-lecole-42-donne-des-fessees-une-fille http://www.19h59.com/WTF/10238_Le-directeur-de-lecole-42-don...
koolkat 12y ago
I'm a student at Epitech, 42 it's a fork of Epitech. They have almost the same program. I love the school methodology it teaches you that grades are not important and that learning is your responsability. I think the conventional system teaches students to be insecure persons that are always looking for validation from authority figures. In this type of system you learn how to search knowledge it changes the pasive role of the student into an active role. Also you learn that healping others and teaching them is good for everyone and never a waste of time. I think the school works really well and one would need to measure the succes of their students in the happiness and sense of acomplishment they have. The school is not a factory producing identical products. It's a human journey of knowledge seeking and personal developement and everyone developes diferently. At times it's very intensive and people that are not really passionate and motivated drop out. As an example of what we do this year the first project we worked on was to recode the malloc function in c. To do this we have some videos explaining the basics as well as some introductory excercises. After some research i found that the projects at harvard cs61 are very similar to what we will be doing in the unix module so i used the book they recomend there Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. I read the relevant section and afterwards i coded a lovely implemenation of malloc. I finished in time the project. Some times it is more dificult, for example for the assambler module i found that it is more dificult to find good explanations online. But this time another student explained some key things and afterwards i was coding in intel assembly. The most dificult information to come by is with respect to parsing and compiler theory or coding in Ocaml. Sometimes i think that if i had a teacher which was an expert in the field this sort of thing would be easy. But the truth is that learning is a personal journey and no one will solve it for us. Education needs to evolve to generate mature people that study and learn because they find that doing so fulfils them and not because they are searching for validation or an external reward waiting for someone to clasify and rank them. Clasification and ranks are subjective and are only means and not ends.
- vmarsy 12y ago
  I like your description of your journey through school but your anecdote is a bit odd: > As an example of what we do this year the first project we worked on was to recode the malloc function in c [...] after some research i found that the projects at harvard cs61 are very similar [...] so i used the book they recomend there Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. I read the relevant section So you used the materials put together by the teacher responsible of CS61 at Harvard, and you read the book recommended to the class You say Epitech and 42 are similar and it describe 42 as: "This French tech school has no teachers, no books, no tuition" Yet to succeed in that case you used the Harvard teacher information(maybe some lecture notes, slides?) and read a book.(borrowed from the library? or 'found' a pdf online) Also on a side note: you had to be able to read and understand that book so your English level had to be at a good working level, level that you do not really have when you're straight out of French high school, does 42 expect their students to be proficient in English?
peferron 12y ago
ITT: French people busy scornfully labelling technically proficient Epitech/42 programmers as "code monkeys" (just ctrl-f for monkey). Meanwhile hackers in the US are too busy building things to care what other people call them. Makes me glad I moved over.
- perishabledave 12y ago
  It's weird, Ive worked with a few people from Epitech. They say the same thing about software engineering in France, but they are some of the best developers I've had the privilege to work with. If it drives them to work over here, then glad to have 'em!
simplexion 12y ago
What's with all the fruit? Is that really the best use of funds?
pinaceae 12y ago
...and France is well known for its leadership in modern technology, especially software. the last big IT assets are being sold off, complete failures. europe as a whole basically is SAP plus its ecosystem. nothing else has survived. and even SAP is investing massively in its shift from Walldorf to the Bay Area. so yeah, a lot of countries have elite schools. hint: all big founders never finished theirs....
sushirain 12y ago
I think that without teachers, the concept is lacking. Even the brightest need teachers. An expert could have helped the students learn more.
jokoon 12y ago
I did the online tests (which were pretty difficult, a lot of logic), and I was admitted to get in to do some additional testing. It's in Paris, and the cost of living there is astronomic. Thanks but no thanks. On top of that, what's the point of taking the smartest young individuals and teaching them how to be engineers ? It's elitist. I agree that the fact that it being free is great, but to me, those students would have been great programmers without that school. It's easy teaching kids who already know almost everything.
- zipeldiablo 12y ago
  Not the smartest, those who are born2code. The selection is here to separate those who can deal with the teaching system of the school from those who can't. The cool part is that there is no other requirements, you don't have to pay 8k per year for the school like students of other schools have to, and you get better results than public schools. The only programming experience i had before 42 was some html/css (far from knowing everything), i could barely do a static website (and i'm not young either, i am 27years old), there is no way i would have learn so much (c, php/js/mysql, assembler, ruby on rails, using docker) all by myself with no guidance at all and absolutly no idea where to start. Being in 42 gives us the motivation, alone at home with a slower learning, not so easy. Yes living in paris is expensive, but if you live in the suburb, maybe part-time work for some people (no deadlines means you can actually work if you want or need it), you can manage it, it's just 3years, with a 6months internship during the first year (you can be paid) and a third year with possible sandwich course if you need it.
  - jokoon 12y ago
    I won't live in paris ever again, sorry. As to learning how to code, I bought a C++ book, and I learned the basics of C by myself, but never really coded anything until I got into some french BTS.
deleted 12y ago
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pol0nium 12y ago
The title is misleading. As koolkat said, 42 is a fork of Epitech. In those schools, programming is taught by projects, and supervised by teaching assistants. The teaching assistants are older students selected by their CS knowledge and their human abilities. This method is preferred by the school because a TA costs less than a real teacher ; and preferred by students because the TA have a closer relationship with them and have a better understanding of the projects (they coded this project 1 or 2 years before). Personally, I was head of the teaching assistants in EPITA for 1 year. EPITA follows the same principles of projects and teaching assistants. We were a team of 30 students and lead the projects for approx. 300 students.
- dang 12y ago
  If you or anyone can suggest a less misleading title, we can change it.
  - pol0nium 12y ago
    It should be a bit more nuanced but I don't have a better suggestion.
- zipeldiablo 12y ago
  There isn't such thing as teaching assistants in 42.
hme 12y ago
I once tried to find interns for my startup at Epitech (42 is a copy of Epitech). Their level in mathematics was abysmal. I mean they didn't even understand how to use basic trigonometric functions. There is a very good reason if the best engineering schools in France only admit students after a 2 years curriculum of pure math/physics/chemistry.
- sebgr 12y ago
  I have quite a few friends in Paris who have also told me that 42 is good at teaching most standard CS concepts but they were definitely not a good choice for "mathematical" projects.
zipeldiablo 12y ago
hey, i'm a student of 42, would like to clarify a few things. About the teaching assistants : we do have a few students helping the pedago team, but they aren't TA, they are in the "bocal" to help the team in place to create new projetcs, maintain the school servers and the intranet, that sort of things. Except if you encounter a bug or if there is something wrong with a subject or some hardware you are not suppose to expect any help from them, at all. Yes 42 is a bit of a fork of epitech, but they don't have the same program anymore, the basic program is the same (projects for the beginner) but new projetcs are totally new, and students are encourage to create new projetcs too (we actually have some, like a project including docker, a student is preparing a OcamL pool etc...). "All of École 42’s projects are meant to be collaborative, so the students work in teams of two to five people" This is not true, the main concept of the school is the peer learning, you are not suppose to do solo projects with other peoples, you are suppose to learn how to do the project with other people, this is actually a different concept, we do have group projects though but it's a minority.
- PaulGregor 12y ago
  Hi. Does knowing only English allow you to feel comfortable in 42, or French is mandatory?
  - zipeldiablo 12y ago
    Personnaly i'm french, but from what i saw it is possible to attend 42 even if you don't speak french (it's a good opportunity to learn it though), sometimes it would be tricky (i think videos are only in french) but if you have question, people who speak english will help you. Actually we have people from usa, ireland, marocco, singapore, romania i think and probably others.
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userbinator 12y ago
Curious about the name I looked around further and according to http://www.42.fr/faqs/ http://www.42.fr/faqs/ it is a HHGTTG reference: > Pourquoi 42 s’appelle 42 ? > On vous met sur la piste… regardez du côté du Guide du voyageur galactique "Don't Panic" would certainly be an appropriate slogan for a school like this.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

236 points by joubert 12y ago

I think it's a great initiative! It might work, it might fail, but at least it is trying! I hope they will manage to produce well rounded graduates, and not just monkey coders. > France already has a reputation for creating great engineers (in software as well as in many other fields). Engineering schools[1] however have a lot of teachers, students have more than 35 hours of class a week. The tuitions are already very low compared to US schools (and there is already no books). Their process is a lot different from what École 42 tries to do. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%A9coles#List_of_graduate_engineering_schools_.28grandes_.C3.A9coles_d.27ing.C3.A9nieurs.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%A9coles#List_of_gra...

djulius 12y ago
In my opinion the goal (as with Epita/Epitech) is to produce monkey coders. What is at least sure, is that these school give a very limited background in cs theory, which is very difficult to overcome to go beyond the monkey coder stage. Because of the shortage of coders, big french consulting companies (Atos, Cap Gemini, ...) hire since decades graduates from every domain more or less related to science/technology and give them a six months training (in the best case) before sending them to the clients. So I'm not that surprised that such a school will be successful as long there is a coder shortage. When the next bubble blows, these graduates will probably be the first to be layed off.
- mickeyben 12y ago
  I was graduated from Epitech and it's right the background in cs theory is very poor but the goal isn't to create monkey coders. The goal of this school and by extension of 42 (the school mentioned in the OP link) is to create real hackers, people able to learn by themselves. Most of the projects are coding projects right but it's oriented in a way that forces you to learn all along the way if you want to succeed. Learn from internet, books or your peers. RTFM is the motto of the school. You'd be surprised by what the students are able to achieve. If that matters some Epitech students work in very successful companies (fb, twitter, google or microsoft) and the Docker founders were in Epitech.
  - song 12y ago
    I come from a French grande ecole but from my experience, I prefer people coming out of Supinfo and Epita/Epitech than people fresh out of a French Grande Ecole. The problem of most people coming out of grande ecoles is that they lack experience, after a few years on the job, they can become great, but newly graduated engineers from Grand Ecoles are not very efficient at the beginning on average. On the other hand, I've seen great candidates from Supinfo and Epitech who learned a lot of the CS theory on the side by themselves and were really good... I think learning CS Theory without a good practical background is actually wasted a bit and that more Grandes Ecoles should try to get students to have more practical experiences which would help them connect the theory to actual situations they've had.
    - agumonkey 12y ago
      Did you see a difference in ability to abstract and or learning speed ?
      - song 12y ago
        No I didn't, but then I do have to say it's not a huge sample size (6 people altogether 3 from Grande Ecoles, 2 from Supinfo, 1 EPITA) but the effect of lack of actual practical experience and slowness due to that was flagrant for the Grandes Ecoles. It was for Rails web application which I have to say requires somewhat less pure CS theory (although it is very useful to reason with).
        agumonkey 12y ago
        Fair enough, that said I feel it's a waste of resources to allocate someone from a 'Grande Ecole' to low level things like a rail app.
        song 12y ago
        I wouldn't say either that a Rails app is low level. Developing a rails app that can handle really high level of traffic does need a lot of specialized and deep knowledge.
- patrickaljord 12y ago
  > In my opinion the goal (as with Epita/Epitech) is to produce monkey coders The creators of Docker and React Native come from Epita/Epitech, so it does produce a few gems :)
  - pol0nium 12y ago
    Docker : from Epitech ;).
- woah 12y ago
  Sounds like you're somebody who doesn't have much to be proud of beyond a diploma.
- mtourne 12y ago
  Typical french elitism. Part looking down at "lesser schools", part afraid of a model that might be different and yield better results. Docker comes to mind, as a silicon valley success story founded entirely by monkey coders.
  - jrbancel 12y ago
    It is not elitism. I know several developers from Epitech that are very very good at what they do. However, they can't be compared with graduates from the top grandes écoles, simply because none of these grandes écoles focus as much as Epitech on training developers. It is a broader education. As a result, graduates from grandes écoles can work pretty much everywhere and most of them don't actually work in tech (usually finance, management consulting, etc...). Epitech graduates can't. Graduates from Epitech, or 42, are very far from having the same ability with mathematics and quantitative sciences in general. That being said, it probably doesn't matter since most tech projects don't require such skills.
    - peferron 12y ago
      The top grandes écoles have the best math/physics students coming in. These students are obviously likely to also be the best math/physics graduates coming out. The only way that wouldn't happen is if the grandes écoles brainwashed their students into stupidity, while Epitech and 42 had a time-distorted super saiyan training chamber. That doesn't say much about the quality of the curriculum.
      - jrbancel 12y ago
        > That doesn't say much about the quality of the curriculum I agree. However, this thread is not about the schools themselves, but their output, the graduates (c.f. parent and GP: "produce monkey coders", "yield better results").
    - mtourne 12y ago
      By saying this you're implying that it is a school that teaches you only one skill, versus teaching you how to teach yourself new skills. Or that the people who attend such school don't have the mental structure to do so. Are you considered more apt to be a leader, or qualified to be a finance quant (even if you never trained for it) with a top school or your resume ? Yes you absolutely are. Also "most of them don't actually work in tech". Yes, that. Programming is considered a dirty job in France by most people from grandes ecoles. They would all rather be architects or consultants. It sounds better on the business card. But someone needs to actually do the job. And this is why there are only tech services companies, but nothing close to a Google.
- feedjoelpie 12y ago
  Getting paid to write code before you've taken CS 101 seems far preferable to taking out piles of student debt, does it not?
  - djulius 12y ago
    France doesn't have such thing as student debt, higher education is close to free in the public system(tuition <1K€/yr)
- rifung 12y ago
  No need to say "monkey coder" instead of just coder or programmer. My school's undergrad curriculum focused very heavily on theory and I appreciated and thoroughly enjoyed it. I think I've had a much stronger theoretical foundation than most I've seen with similar experience. On the other hand, I don't really feel like any of my jobs have really required that knowledge whatsoever. I certainly don't see a problem people learning any theory necessary as they go if they are just planning on working in the industry. I certainly appreciate the theoretical background but I really would have a hard time believing having this theoretical knowledge is necessary to becoming more than a "monkey coder" whatever that means. It's not as though these people are going to a research university or planning on doing research; they are going to learn to program and maybe gain the skills to find a job, and that's certainly what they are getting.
- pol0nium 12y ago
  Beware of the confusion between Epita and Epitech. These two schools are very different. Epita is an engineering school and it is absolutely not focused on producing programmers. The school teaches electronics, physics, OS, embedded systems, compilers, management, security,... _and_ programming. Epitech, is not an engineering school and is focused on creating programmers (but still provide some other courses).
- realusername 12y ago
  For me, it's the complete opposite. Coding is like learning a music instrument, it's 10% theory and 90% hard try-and-try-again practice to figure out how things works in real life. Nobody would suggest that you can learn an instrument by sitting in a class all day studding music sheets. But suddenly for programming, people create absurd degrees where you only have theory courses.

Dralon 12y ago

(French Engineer inside) The project looks awesome obviously. What you need to know out of the context with it's director (Xavier Niel), is the guy is an ace of communication. Looking a little more into details and feedbacks from people who did the school, it's a VERY different story. I would highly doubt anything that comes to the communication about 42. Probably the vision is achievable, I'm not sure it is by this school.

baby 12y ago
> Looking a little more into details and feedbacks from people who did the school, it's a VERY different story. I'm curious to know where are those people who came out of42. The school opened like 4 years ago right? So the first graduates must have been last year. If you have any stories to share I'm curious :)
- negrit 12y ago
  Actually there are no graduates yet.
- xeope 12y ago
  > If you have any stories to share I'm curious :) I did 42 for 1 year. Now I'm working as sysadmin. During the first year, we had projets with limited time (depends on the difficulty, from 1 to 6 weeks). We had 2/3 projets at the same time. This school is kinda like Epitech. The staff is composed by students (I was one of them, I joined them after 3/4 month of learning at 42) and people who came from Epitech (sysadmins, 'teachers', web dev). Yes, there is a kind of 'teachers'. They create the first videos, the subjects (mostly taken from Epitech too :)) But this year, there was a big change. Now student can create subjects, videos. The projects are not limited in time. We are not working for 100hours/week, but a lot of people are at school for more than 50hours/week. This depends on their faculty to learn and their motivation. But... There is some bad points for 42. There is no labs. There is no books. There is no English class (as you can see with my poor english :) ), no math class, no French class (and a lot of people really need it....). When you see people reading the man pages in french, you feel sad for them. Whe you see people not able to do some math, you feel sad for them too. And, seriously, a library or some labs for the students can be a good thing. 42 is a cool thing for people who have not the 'baccalauréat'. I dont have this degree but thanks 42, now I have a great job. If I had this degree, my choice for a school might be something like ENSIMAG / ENSEIRB, but definitly not Epita / Epitech. Btw. > In fact, 40 percent of École 42’s students haven’t finished high school. Others have graduated from Stanford or MIT or other prestigious institutions. Why someone from a prestigious school would like to come to 42 ?

jarnix 12y ago

Yes, and it's a terrible school ("citation needed"). There are also other schools (like ETNA for example) where the teachers are almost non-existant, your teachers are the students of last year, (you actually pay for this, it's not public schools). Engineering schools do not have a lot of teachers in France, I don't understand where you get that from.

jarnix 12y ago
Thank you for the downvote. Sorry but I am just telling the truth. If you have any counter arguments, please tell them, I would be happy to learn something about the tech schools in my country.

GhiGt 12y ago

Nothing revolutionary at all, its manager (Nicolas Sadirac) had created EPITECH in 1999 (I did this school). The program is exactly the same. The only things which change is that Ecole 42 is free and takes only the 3 firsts years of EPITECH instead of 5.

yodsanklai 12y ago
Doesn't prove anything but Google Paris organized a programming contest last month and 42 along with all Epitech perform very poorly https://sites.google.com/site/hashcode2015/results https://sites.google.com/site/hashcode2015/results
- patrickaljord 12y ago
  Some of the top schools on this list only let in people who are already extremely good _before_ they even get in the school (École normale supérieure for example), 42 accepts almost anyone. If people getting into a school are already very good before they get in, how do you know they got better thanks to the school? They would probably have scored very high at any school. I think, if you consider that the job of a school is to educate people, then if 42 can turn someone with little education into an average to great programmer, that's a great accomplishment. In comparison, Ecole normale sup turns extremely bright and knowledgeable people into great programmers, not such a great accomplishment IMO.
  - yodsanklai 12y ago
    > 42 accepts almost anyone Well, that's not what the article says. "Last year, 70,000 people attempted the online qualification test. ... In the end, 890 students were selected for the school’s inaugural class" But I agree that it's difficult to judge the quality of formation considering that the student populations are different. But still, I don't see how how throwing programming challenges at CS beginners with no supervision can be better than university professors.
    - palunon 12y ago

aikah 12y ago

Well the teachers are(will be since it's the first year) the students. Several engineering schools do that in France and abroad. It's a good PR for Niel.

r0naa 12y ago

FWIW I have heard terrible things from people studying there. While it looks good on paper, the sad reality is that it's basically a code monkey factory. Also, I don't really think that this kind of trade school are relevant in France where access to education is low.

uniclaude 12y ago

This is a fantastic initiative, and like a lot of businesses built by Xavier Niel, I hope it leads to positive changes in the industry. This said, what I would be worried about with this system is how long it will take for the employment market to adapt to this/those schools. When it comes to jobs, French companies, especially large ones, have a really strong bias towards applicants from well known and somewhat elitist public schools, no matter how efficient those might actually be at their jobs. Unlike the US, France doesn't really have a strong and major software industry competing for raw programming talent, so developers have nowhere near the salary, status, or lifestyle they could expect in places like SV or NY. Very few companies have a real incentive to hire a great programmer over a good one, which might reduce the efficiency of a school that focuses on training very good developers without giving them the access to the prestige of the (also free) traditional public schools. It will be interesting to see how salaries and career paths available to programmers trained at École 42 will compare with those hired after they graduate from École Centrale Paris. Nevertheless, I look forward to hire from this talent pool.

yodsanklai 12y ago
> French companies, especially large ones, have a really strong bias towards applicants from well known and somewhat elitist public schools, Not only French companies, but also banks, hedge funds, companies like Google and so on... I was saying that in an other comment, but recently Google Paris organized a programming contest. All teams in the top ten came from top schools (mainly ENS, but also ECP and X) whereas 42 performed extremely poorly. There's a reason why employers are biased towards elite schools.
- patrickaljord 12y ago
  42 performed poorly because it's only been in existence for a year so they have no graduates yet. Only people who've been learning for a year. Time will tell if this school will produce great coders.
  - p4bl0 12y ago
    The people participating in the Google hashcode contest for any school do not have graduated from that school yet.

yodsanklai 12y ago

The story that Xavier Niel (school founder) is trying to tell is that there are many bright students that didn't fit in the traditional/oldish education system, but they could reach their full potential in this new school. I don't buy it. First, there's a large panel of CS formations in France, most of them virtually free. It goes from highly selective schools "grandes écoles", to universities or undergraduate programs that anyone with a high-school diploma can attend. There's room for many different student profiles there. Then, I don't see why it would be such a progress to get rid of the teachers and the books, are they that bad that they prevent the students from improving? > The students are given little direction about how to solve the problems, so they have to turn to each other — and to the Internet — to figure out the solutions. Usually, this is what professors do when they are too lazy to cook up a real project.

p4bl0 12y ago
Your comment made me realize that for instance at ENS (one of the French topmost Grande École) we had professors but the courses were focusing on theory, and for example there is no courses on a programming languages (there is a compiler / programming language course, but it is focused on the theoretical aspects of things, what I mean is that there is no C or C++ or Python course, you are just supposed to pick it up yourself if you need it). Meanwhile, we also had projects that we had to figure out by ourselves. For instance in the first semester of the first year, there is a course that explains theoretical stuffs that are supposed to have a relation with hardware (like 2-adic numbers [1]). The project for this course consists in programming a watch that displays time. But we have to program the watch in an assembly language that we have designed ourselves. And that asm has to execute on a processor that we have designed ourselves. And we have to write the processor code in a hardware/netlist language that we have to design ourselves. And we have to write ourselves the interpreter we will use for that netlist language. That was what we were told to do, with no additional instructions. Some students learned C by themselves for that, some other C++, some other OCaml… And all of them learned or reinvented how to design memories, or a CPU (for instance, me and a friend decided to invent a single-instruction processor, just for the fun, we got it working but it was rather slow compared to other who decided for instance to learn how to implement a simplified MIPS). All this to say that there is absolutely no incompatibility between having professors and teaching (partly) by projects. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_number

S4M 12y ago

Seems like another initiative to disrupt the traditional model <good university> -> <good job>, after the MOOCs and soon Star Fighter. I think it's a good thing to disrupt prestigious universities that hire on credentials, but France is not exactly the country for that since education is mostly free and admissions (at least in engineering schools) tries to be more meritocratic. EDIT: disclaimer: I did an engineering school in France.

eva1984 12y ago

So basically, it is a big/free internet cafe?

exceptione 12y ago

I think it is fantastic to make many programming hours during your education. However, I am wondering if these students would learn the computer science fundamentals which are usually found in more or less dry books. Programming analysis, logic, fundamentals of programming language implementation etcetera. You can't say: look on the internet and find the relevant papers in all those fields and synthesize the theory by yourselves. That would be highly inefficient, a problem we tackle with education. If you make the comparison to Harvard you aim for more than educating people to become good/ exceptionally effective developers in my understanding.

bsaul 12y ago
You're right, they don't ( i've interviewed people from the epitech, which was created by the same people). That's the one big shortcoming of the curriculum. They're claiming to teach the next zuckerberg or page, but they forgot that those two people have a strong general scientific background. Yet, they do create people that are truely amazing at coding.
- mathattack 12y ago
  Is it possible to pick up what they're missing later? Or is it something like Calculus or Accounting, where if you don't pick it up by college, the odds of picking it up later are negligible?
  - andrewchambers 12y ago
    It's not the odds of picking it up, its the need or willpower to do it. Most people just get by with what they already know and don't bother to try and learn anything new after a certain age.
  - bsaul 12y ago
    I don't think it's impossible, but if you have any desire or love for abstract reasonning and theory, you'll probably feel a bit sad eating projects after projects of low-level C programming. The kind of people going out of this school will most likely build OS implementation stuffs, or security appliance, or VM or compilers. But probably not a new compression or distributed concensus algorithm, unless they already have a personnal interest for the fields.

metasean 12y ago

>The only requirement is that they be between the ages of 18 and 30. I'd estimate that well over half of my bootcamp cohort was over 30.

desdiv 12y ago
Now that you mention it, isn't this just age discrimination? I would get in serious legal trouble if I posted an ad saying "Hiring software engineers; ages 18 to 30 only." Doesn't the same apply to schools?

smsm42 12y ago

It sounds very novel and interesting, but for me for example I know I need _some_ structure to learn something. It doesn't have to be a formal university degree structure, but some kind of arrangement of material, mentorship, progress tracking, experience sharing, feedback, etc. is necessary for me. I kind of doubt that giving a person with no programming/CS experience Google and a task like "write a concurrent distributed high-performance database system" would lead to a good outcome. There is a lot of trade lore, experience, knowledge of what works and what doesn't, etc. which is better passed by a teacher in an carefully constructed narrative than by random discovery by an uninitiated person. But it is interesting to see what comes out of it, maybe they prove me wrong.

Mitsu0 12y ago
"some kind of arrangement of material, mentorship, progress tracking, experience sharing, feedback" There is (more or less) all that in 42, thanks to the "peer to peer" approach.
- smsm42 12y ago
  Mentorship from peers may lead to a "blind leading the blind" situation. I'd prefer some experience/knowledge transfer involved.

tienthanh8490 12y ago

Anyone knows where to find some sample projects from this school ?

pandark 12y ago
http://wolf3d42.tumblr.com/ http://wolf3d42.tumblr.com/ http://raytracer42.tumblr.com/ http://raytracer42.tumblr.com/

lazyant 12y ago

> Yet École 42 is harder to get into than Harvard If you select the very best few, you could get them into an empty barn, or have them walk the Appalachian Trail or whatever and the "school" will have great success measured by what the smart motivated students accomplished.

azinman2 12y ago
Maybe? The question to me is a) how well do they learn things and understand the deeper principals such that their understandings generalize? B) what do they end up learning/creating? Is it like the mit media lab where they're encouraged to innovate 5-10 years out, or are they building stuff that's existed for a long time like Ray tracing? C) if everything is team based, do the smarter/type a ppl end up doing all the work or does everyone contribute equally enough to learn? D) is there any kind of mentorship? The stuff I've learned from my mentors across school was never what was being assigned in class; understanding that there are things that you would never think of as entire fields needs guidance for the not yet educated Sounds like a cool concept for self starters however.
- zipeldiablo 12y ago
  a) projects are here to teach us notions, for exemple the first minishell we had to code was there to teach us execve and fork (basics to code a shell). b) first we are building stuff the way the school wants, basically you have to do a programm that do certains things (like recoding a wolf3d for exemple) and you have to follow the coding norme of the school, you are free to do it the way you want as long as you follow the rules for the project. But there is also free projects, during 6months you can do what you want the way you want as long as it is a real project and not 6months of vacation. c) not everything is team based, except for rushes and some projects, all projects are individuals, we learn together yes but we don't code all the time together. d) You don't have one mentor, every student can be your mentor, the concept of the peer learning is exactly what you describe, talking to other students to get help, another approach of the projects, learning new things, etc.
eloisant 12y ago
Actually I don't think it's harder to get into than Harvard. They have many, many applicants because they don't put any restriction. You can apply even if you didn't go to high school. Also, they have no tuition but neither do the public universities in France ("Grandes Écoles"), and the most selective and prestigious schools are public. So while the "no tuition" thing is impressive for a private school and may sound like a dream for Americans, it's not really rare in France considering the choice you have with public schools. Finally, not really related to the way they teach there, but here's the director (same guy in the picture on the article) spanking a girl in a classroom during off-hours (nsfw). http://www.19h59.com/WTF/10238_Le-directeur-de-lecole-42-donne-des-fessees-une-fille http://www.19h59.com/WTF/10238_Le-directeur-de-lecole-42-don...

koolkat 12y ago

I'm a student at Epitech, 42 it's a fork of Epitech. They have almost the same program. I love the school methodology it teaches you that grades are not important and that learning is your responsability. I think the conventional system teaches students to be insecure persons that are always looking for validation from authority figures. In this type of system you learn how to search knowledge it changes the pasive role of the student into an active role. Also you learn that healping others and teaching them is good for everyone and never a waste of time. I think the school works really well and one would need to measure the succes of their students in the happiness and sense of acomplishment they have. The school is not a factory producing identical products. It's a human journey of knowledge seeking and personal developement and everyone developes diferently. At times it's very intensive and people that are not really passionate and motivated drop out. As an example of what we do this year the first project we worked on was to recode the malloc function in c. To do this we have some videos explaining the basics as well as some introductory excercises. After some research i found that the projects at harvard cs61 are very similar to what we will be doing in the unix module so i used the book they recomend there Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. I read the relevant section and afterwards i coded a lovely implemenation of malloc. I finished in time the project. Some times it is more dificult, for example for the assambler module i found that it is more dificult to find good explanations online. But this time another student explained some key things and afterwards i was coding in intel assembly. The most dificult information to come by is with respect to parsing and compiler theory or coding in Ocaml. Sometimes i think that if i had a teacher which was an expert in the field this sort of thing would be easy. But the truth is that learning is a personal journey and no one will solve it for us. Education needs to evolve to generate mature people that study and learn because they find that doing so fulfils them and not because they are searching for validation or an external reward waiting for someone to clasify and rank them. Clasification and ranks are subjective and are only means and not ends.

vmarsy 12y ago
I like your description of your journey through school but your anecdote is a bit odd: > As an example of what we do this year the first project we worked on was to recode the malloc function in c [...] after some research i found that the projects at harvard cs61 are very similar [...] so i used the book they recomend there Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. I read the relevant section So you used the materials put together by the teacher responsible of CS61 at Harvard, and you read the book recommended to the class You say Epitech and 42 are similar and it describe 42 as: "This French tech school has no teachers, no books, no tuition" Yet to succeed in that case you used the Harvard teacher information(maybe some lecture notes, slides?) and read a book.(borrowed from the library? or 'found' a pdf online) Also on a side note: you had to be able to read and understand that book so your English level had to be at a good working level, level that you do not really have when you're straight out of French high school, does 42 expect their students to be proficient in English?

peferron 12y ago

ITT: French people busy scornfully labelling technically proficient Epitech/42 programmers as "code monkeys" (just ctrl-f for monkey). Meanwhile hackers in the US are too busy building things to care what other people call them. Makes me glad I moved over.

perishabledave 12y ago
It's weird, Ive worked with a few people from Epitech. They say the same thing about software engineering in France, but they are some of the best developers I've had the privilege to work with. If it drives them to work over here, then glad to have 'em!

simplexion 12y ago

What's with all the fruit? Is that really the best use of funds?

pinaceae 12y ago

...and France is well known for its leadership in modern technology, especially software. the last big IT assets are being sold off, complete failures. europe as a whole basically is SAP plus its ecosystem. nothing else has survived. and even SAP is investing massively in its shift from Walldorf to the Bay Area. so yeah, a lot of countries have elite schools. hint: all big founders never finished theirs....

sushirain 12y ago

I think that without teachers, the concept is lacking. Even the brightest need teachers. An expert could have helped the students learn more.

jokoon 12y ago

I did the online tests (which were pretty difficult, a lot of logic), and I was admitted to get in to do some additional testing. It's in Paris, and the cost of living there is astronomic. Thanks but no thanks. On top of that, what's the point of taking the smartest young individuals and teaching them how to be engineers ? It's elitist. I agree that the fact that it being free is great, but to me, those students would have been great programmers without that school. It's easy teaching kids who already know almost everything.

zipeldiablo 12y ago
Not the smartest, those who are born2code. The selection is here to separate those who can deal with the teaching system of the school from those who can't. The cool part is that there is no other requirements, you don't have to pay 8k per year for the school like students of other schools have to, and you get better results than public schools. The only programming experience i had before 42 was some html/css (far from knowing everything), i could barely do a static website (and i'm not young either, i am 27years old), there is no way i would have learn so much (c, php/js/mysql, assembler, ruby on rails, using docker) all by myself with no guidance at all and absolutly no idea where to start. Being in 42 gives us the motivation, alone at home with a slower learning, not so easy. Yes living in paris is expensive, but if you live in the suburb, maybe part-time work for some people (no deadlines means you can actually work if you want or need it), you can manage it, it's just 3years, with a 6months internship during the first year (you can be paid) and a third year with possible sandwich course if you need it.
- jokoon 12y ago
  I won't live in paris ever again, sorry. As to learning how to code, I bought a C++ book, and I learned the basics of C by myself, but never really coded anything until I got into some french BTS.

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pol0nium 12y ago

The title is misleading. As koolkat said, 42 is a fork of Epitech. In those schools, programming is taught by projects, and supervised by teaching assistants. The teaching assistants are older students selected by their CS knowledge and their human abilities. This method is preferred by the school because a TA costs less than a real teacher ; and preferred by students because the TA have a closer relationship with them and have a better understanding of the projects (they coded this project 1 or 2 years before). Personally, I was head of the teaching assistants in EPITA for 1 year. EPITA follows the same principles of projects and teaching assistants. We were a team of 30 students and lead the projects for approx. 300 students.

dang 12y ago
If you or anyone can suggest a less misleading title, we can change it.
- pol0nium 12y ago
  It should be a bit more nuanced but I don't have a better suggestion.
zipeldiablo 12y ago
There isn't such thing as teaching assistants in 42.

hme 12y ago

I once tried to find interns for my startup at Epitech (42 is a copy of Epitech). Their level in mathematics was abysmal. I mean they didn't even understand how to use basic trigonometric functions. There is a very good reason if the best engineering schools in France only admit students after a 2 years curriculum of pure math/physics/chemistry.

sebgr 12y ago
I have quite a few friends in Paris who have also told me that 42 is good at teaching most standard CS concepts but they were definitely not a good choice for "mathematical" projects.

zipeldiablo 12y ago

hey, i'm a student of 42, would like to clarify a few things. About the teaching assistants : we do have a few students helping the pedago team, but they aren't TA, they are in the "bocal" to help the team in place to create new projetcs, maintain the school servers and the intranet, that sort of things. Except if you encounter a bug or if there is something wrong with a subject or some hardware you are not suppose to expect any help from them, at all. Yes 42 is a bit of a fork of epitech, but they don't have the same program anymore, the basic program is the same (projects for the beginner) but new projetcs are totally new, and students are encourage to create new projetcs too (we actually have some, like a project including docker, a student is preparing a OcamL pool etc...). "All of École 42’s projects are meant to be collaborative, so the students work in teams of two to five people" This is not true, the main concept of the school is the peer learning, you are not suppose to do solo projects with other peoples, you are suppose to learn how to do the project with other people, this is actually a different concept, we do have group projects though but it's a minority.

PaulGregor 12y ago
Hi. Does knowing only English allow you to feel comfortable in 42, or French is mandatory?
- zipeldiablo 12y ago
  Personnaly i'm french, but from what i saw it is possible to attend 42 even if you don't speak french (it's a good opportunity to learn it though), sometimes it would be tricky (i think videos are only in french) but if you have question, people who speak english will help you. Actually we have people from usa, ireland, marocco, singapore, romania i think and probably others.

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userbinator 12y ago

Curious about the name I looked around further and according to http://www.42.fr/faqs/ http://www.42.fr/faqs/ it is a HHGTTG reference: > Pourquoi 42 s’appelle 42 ? > On vous met sur la piste… regardez du côté du Guide du voyageur galactique "Don't Panic" would certainly be an appropriate slogan for a school like this.

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