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Comment by vmarsy | Hacker News Reader

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_gra...

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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.

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.

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.

Did you see a difference in ability to abstract and or learning speed ?

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).

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.

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.

Fair enough, I was too quick to judge.

That sounds about right, although it does indicate how programming jobs are fairly different from traditional engineering jobs. What you describe with new graduates is not far from what engineering companies have traditionally actually wanted. The expectation is that the university teaches the fundamentals, both "pure" fundamentals like math and physics, and also classes of techniques like finite-element modeling. But becoming proficient with applying a specific finite-element-modeling package within the context of a particular engineering domain, workflow, and procedures: that's more the responsibility of a new-hire training program. Of course completely new graduates will typically take longer to get up to speed than people with years of work experience in a similar job, but that's also why junior engineers get paid less.

>> RTFM is the motto of the school.

That sounds like theory, probably closer to RTFSO (read the fucking Stack Overflow)

> 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 :)

Docker : from Epitech ;).

Sounds like you're somebody who doesn't have much to be proud of beyond a diploma.

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.

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.

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.

> 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").

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.

Sorry for using monkey coders term, just took it back from the original comment. My comment was not meant to be elitist at all. I know that Epitech/Epita produces lot of great coders, no problem with that.

The thing is that the french system lacks a proper CS education. "Grandes Ecoles" has the best student but offers pretty limited courses in CS (except maybe TPT, not that sure) and not that much coding experience. Universities are the only offering deep theory education and sometimes good coding experience but their degree are not well recognized so they don't attract good students. As a consequence private schools try to fill the gap by offering a great education in programming, however lacking the CS foundation.

Getting paid to write code before you've taken CS 101 seems far preferable to taking out piles of student debt, does it not?

France doesn't have such thing as student debt, higher education is close to free in the public system(tuition <1K€/yr)

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.

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).

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.

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