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Comment by LAMike | Hacker News Reader

15 hours a day? On fake problems?

Why not teach them basic skills on the frontend and backend and let them work on projects for 15 hours a day?

The article does not disclose what the actual 3 years curriculum will be like, it's merely stated that this is phase 2 of a weed out process that started with online cognitive skill exercises. The remaining 4000 candidates will for the next month be challenged 15h a day on computer problems. Only 800 of them will go on to do the 3 years program, which we really know nothing about, except that on the last year there's a huge project they have to work on together.

There's really nothing more than that, we don't even know if by the end of the month there will be practical projects.

From what I gather the 42 team has a really poor view of anything web-dev related.

They have this idea of creating "hardcore devs", because supposedly they are better and if you can code hardcore you can code anything. (An idea that obviously lead to entire categories of failures, because not two systems are alike, and developing necessitate many skills, including communicating, writing, leading)

Note that this is what I gather in part by talking to a pre-selected student that didn't make the final line (nor she wanted too); and in part by reading the 3 year program of the school, the interviews.

Epitech Alumni here (42 is basically the same thing but free). The idea is rather that if you start from low level programming it is not difficult to go up, and you can pretty much do anything after that. I do think that starting from C/C++ & having a good understanding of how any interpreted language work makes you a better web developer. Not that it guarantees it / is absolutely necessary, but it gives you a broader understanding, and that's what the founding team from 42 believes too.

I would have to agree with this. As much as people tend to hate the technical interviews on here, it's not an excuse NOT to know the stuff, even in web development.

If you're only doing to do crud apps the the typical RoR project, you're going to be a lot better off with an algorithms background vs codecademy student 25013.

I think a practical approach to theory done right has immense potential though.

I'm guessing French unions don't want unpaid students doing real work because they want the real work to be done by employed people.

This has nothing to do with unions and all to do with the archaic views on education and developers of the founders.

Note that I teach in a French web school where students do work on real projects from real clients, for free, in year 2 and 3. In another web school where I teach at 'master level', year 5, the project are real paid projects for real clients.

It's totally possible, and I must say, it's even the rising ideology that you have to make students work on "real projects" (with wildly varying definition of what that means); so yes, it's a little bit crazy to see young students working 3 years 15 hours a day on arbitrary exercises, and calling it a school that will produce wildly creative professionals.

Well I guess that when you have a good story it is a shame to let facts get in the way.

French unions have no say in the curriculum of a private school (and it would make absolutely no sense, lot of fantams about french unions there I think!).

Private school can teach pretty much what they want. If they want they diploma recognised by the government then they must comply to some policies of the ministry of education, but it is up to them.

Why fake problems ?

Rewritting a shell / ircd / httpd seems like a really good place to start to learn about the unix system / network / versioning systems / working in a team / learning how to find answer to things you know very few about. That's part of the program.

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