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42 (school)

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Re: 42 (school)

#71

Post by namdnay »

maxymoos wrote: post #30
fhrow4484 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> private schools are expensive > I checked Epitech tuition fees, it's around 40k€ for the whole 5 years curriculum $9100 a year is indeed expensive for French schools, but I'm sure some Americans on the other side of the ponds are chuckling right now.

For comparison purposes, tuition fees in a French public engineering school were around 700€/$800 per year when I was there about a decade ago, and I wouldn't expect this to have changed much.

And if you're the best of the best, they pay you to attend (X, ENS)

Re: 42 (school)

#72

Post by liotier »

valw wrote: post #59
liotier wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Development requires analysis and programming. Some people are both analysts and programmers - they are the elite, not the norm. I can manage large business requirements, I write functional specifications and negotiate them with users, I plan technical architecture... And then I'm happy enough with programmers who need hand-holding at every step - anyway my telco employer has long stopped having budget enough to pay…

Even without the burden of understanding business requirements, it still takes programmers a fair amount of analysis to program without making a mess that will kill their ability to make progress; learning the latest JavaScript framework does not help at all in that regard. I'm glad to hear you manage, but your employer may want to consider hiring fewer programmers and paying them higher wages - I know a lot of compa…

> your employer may want to consider hiring fewer programmers and paying them higher wages

I do advocate a high-low mix with fewer people and a higher proportion of the higher tier, but the purchasing department loves low unit prices and has decision over them. Well, at least we have the developers co-located with us in the same office and no longer work with offshore Indians through two layers of intermediaries... Progress !

Re: 42 (school)

#73

Post by namdnay »

hycaria wrote: post #55

Honestly I'm unsure about this (except if you're a fresh high school graduate). Sure you will probably land a job in tech but considering how easy it is now for ANYONE to land a job in tech, is such a school really needed ? Resources online are plenty (and actually 42's main way of learning), so learning material is not the problem. If you're already in the workforce, you can get yourself a training through the emplo…

> except if you're a fresh high school graduate

That's their main source of students, no?

Re: 42 (school)

#74

Post by sebcat »

valw wrote: post #32

Having interviewed a bunch of 42 graduates, my main issue with 42 is that it doesn't teach their students to think about what they're doing, encouraging them instead to rush to the keyboard and emit as much code as they can as if programming for the last day of their project. This seems to resonate well with the culture of piscines at 42. To me, this is as silly as training Biathlon athletes to not even aim before th…

> This seems to resonate well with the culture of piscines at 42

I do not understand this. What does "culture of piscines" mean? I assume it's not literally pool culture.

Re: 42 (school)

#75

Post by wutschkef »

I'm a student at the Paris 42 campus. It is not true that the average 42 student lack theoretical understanding. We may not take a semester long course in compiler theory for example, but we do manage to build our own shell scripting interpreters and pick up enough compiler theory to define a grammar, build a parser to produce an AST and then interpret it accordingly. The same goes for other theoretical foundations of programming. I understand that the traditional way of hiring engineers and teaching them practical programming skills on the job is well established. But you would be surprised how good some of our students are both in theory and practice and how few guidance they required in reaching their level of skill. If you have any questions about the curriculum or our work here in general, feel free to contact me!

Re: 42 (school)

#76

Post by onion90 »

sebcat wrote: post #74
valw wrote: post #32

Having interviewed a bunch of 42 graduates, my main issue with 42 is that it doesn't teach their students to think about what they're doing, encouraging them instead to rush to the keyboard and emit as much code as they can as if programming for the last day of their project. This seems to resonate well with the culture of piscines at 42. To me, this is as silly as training Biathlon athletes to not even aim before th…

> This seems to resonate well with the culture of piscines at 42 I do not understand this. What does "culture of piscines" mean? I assume it's not literally pool culture.

I think it refers to the culture of the first selection phase which is called 'la piscine'

Re: 42 (school)

#77

Post by liotier »

namdnay wrote: post #70
liotier wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Development requires analysis and programming. Some people are both analysts and programmers - they are the elite, not the norm. I can manage large business requirements, I write functional specifications and negotiate them with users, I plan technical architecture... And then I'm happy enough with programmers who need hand-holding at every step - anyway my telco employer has long stopped having budget enough to pay…

Though it is quite common, I think this is a very bad way to organise a business. It's as if programming were bricklaying, a simple operation to be performed under instructions from an architect. That's just not true, the main reason being that if you're not programming any more, how can you define a modern technical architecture? If you don't know the precise technical limitations, how can you negotiate functional s…

> if you're not programming any more, how can you define a modern technical architecture ?

Knowing one's limitations is key - I certainly won't get in the way of implementers. But functional requirements do drive some architectural decisions and spotting them upstream helps, for example once the conceptual data model and typical query usage are defined, one can decide whether the contractor one sends a purchase order for needs to grok graph databases or relational ones.

Re: 42 (school)

#78

Post by agumonkey »

EZ-E wrote: post #10

This kind of discussion will end up being the typical (French) disdain between people learning engineering in the public schools v/s the ones learning in these "practical teaching" private schools and vice versa. There are good engineers in both, both have different approach to teach which fit different people. Both do generally good in the private sector after they're done with it. As usual the people graduating fro…

Everytime I ask someone who met students of a certain kind (private, elite, public) they always say "They're lame". :)

Re: 42 (school)

#79

Post by tw1010 »

eloisant wrote: post #60
valw wrote: post #32

Having interviewed a bunch of 42 graduates, my main issue with 42 is that it doesn't teach their students to think about what they're doing, encouraging them instead to rush to the keyboard and emit as much code as they can as if programming for the last day of their project. This seems to resonate well with the culture of piscines at 42. To me, this is as silly as training Biathlon athletes to not even aim before th…

Yes, they modelled it after Epita which was also about code, code, code. Also, while it's nice that Xavier Niel finances a school that is free, most of the universities and Grandes Ecoles (where many developers graduate from) are also free, and financed with public money. They work great and produce really skilled developers and architects. The reality is that Xavier Niel didn't do a Grandes Ecoles, he's mostly self-…

That totally sounds like gossip to me. I'm very sceptical that "he [created] a school [as a] kind of a middle finger to them".

Re: 42 (school)

#80

Post by sildar »

sebcat wrote: post #74
valw wrote: post #32

Having interviewed a bunch of 42 graduates, my main issue with 42 is that it doesn't teach their students to think about what they're doing, encouraging them instead to rush to the keyboard and emit as much code as they can as if programming for the last day of their project. This seems to resonate well with the culture of piscines at 42. To me, this is as silly as training Biathlon athletes to not even aim before th…

> This seems to resonate well with the culture of piscines at 42 I do not understand this. What does "culture of piscines" mean? I assume it's not literally pool culture.

Piscines are intensive multi-days coding sessions that are predominant in these schools (selection for entry is done with those sessions as well).

This is to encourage the "get shit done" mantra of these schools.

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