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42 (school)

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Re: 42 (school)

#101

Post by vntok »

palunon wrote: post #85
eloisant wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

> Yes, they modelled it after Epita which was also about code, code, code. Yeah, no. 42 was modeled on Epitech. If EPITA was about "code, code, code", why did Sadirac leave and founded Epitech and 42 ?

For other reasons _in addition_ to that one? Many people make decisions based on a weighted linear combination of criteria.

Re: 42 (school)

#102

Post by moviuro »

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.

2012-2015 was still 700€/year at Centrale - I'll let you guess which one.

Don't forget though that housing, food, "Sécurité Sociale", library, etc. weren't included.

Re: 42 (school)

#103

Post by alehul »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #99
valw wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on how long you wait before making the students sensitive to these issues. Wait 6 months or 1 year, and you've given them time to gather sufficient experience for motivating a more mindful way of working. Wait 3 years or more, and you've just taught them bad habits. I'm tired of interviewing candidates who were supposedly trained extensively in programming, asking them "how do you approach making qu…

It sounds like you are expecting junior hires to be senior, instead of training them. The average elite computer science student spends 3 years learning computer science before they start building professional programs.

It depends on the curriculum. At the last place I studied Computer Science, the department was led largely by Matthias Felleisen and Olin Shivers, and the first book they require reading is How to Design Programs: https://htdp.org/2018-01-06/Book/part_preface.html

You could write 100% functional code that handles every edge case you could think of, and you could still get a B- on an exam for not using the 'Design Recipe.' While frustrating, the students do emerge as 'junior SWEs' with a grasp on how to design organized, efficient, and complex programs themselves.

Re: 42 (school)

#104

Post by majewsky »

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.

For more comparison, tuition feeds at my alma mater (a German university) were 500€ per year. Most of that was for the semester ticket, that allowed me to use public transit completely for free across the entire state (Saxony).

Re: 42 (school)

#105

Post by jki275 »

jl-gitlab wrote: post #88
udioron wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> coding is to software development what moving pieces is to chess. AFAIK, when teaching kids chess, the best way to start is teaching them how to move the pieces.

The very next thing you teach them after the theoretical knowledge of how the pieces move is to sit on their hands, to avoid making impulsive moves.

This -- absolutely.

Knowing how to move the pieces is a foundational piece of information, but without the understanding of the theory of the game it's useless information.

Re: 42 (school)

#106

Post by ElFitz »

hh3k0 wrote: post #94
ElFitz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite honestly, most companies don't care about one's compiler theory knowledge or ability to build shell scripting interpreters, nor should they.

> Quite honestly, most companies don't care about one's compiler theory knowledge or ability to build shell scripting interpreters, nor should they. Your reply, in the context of the comment you replied to, strikes me as a point of view so American that it's almost cliché. I think that it'd be quite sad if we'd adjust education so that it'd merely contain things that are of interest to companies.

I'm French. And I live and work in France.

Although yes, it's sad to adjust education strictly to companies' needs. It's also sad to force people to spend so much time on the intrisinc workings of a microprocessor when all they want is to make web apps or a living ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There's no one size fits all.

Re: 42 (school)

#107

Post by ElFitz »

LukeB42 wrote: post #98
ElFitz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite honestly, most companies don't care about one's compiler theory knowledge or ability to build shell scripting interpreters, nor should they.

> Quite honestly, most companies don't care about one's compiler theory knowledge or ability to build shell scripting interpreters, nor should they. Right. Like how you don't care about the persons' physics knowledge when hiring an architect. /s

No. Like you don't care about one's ability to make some concrete when hiring an architect. It's nice to have, might be essential on some specific projects. Usually won't matter.

Re: 42 (school)

#108

Post by ___alt »

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-…

> Yes, they modelled it after Epita which was also about code, code, code.

I don't know where you last got your information about Epita, but this has been less and less true for around 10 years now.

They sought to have a state certified engineering degree for a long time and implemented a lot of changes around 2003-2007 that made the cursus a bit less about code a more about common engineering stuff (maths, physics, english, ...) with more structure (they structured classes with a credit system, made more standard student evaluations, ...)

Source: graduated in that era, been in touch with later students.

Re: 42 (school)

#109

Post by mbaha »

arcatek wrote: post #54
titanix2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot to mention the private schools are expensive and use a somewhat pyramidal scheme where older students teach newer ones to repaid part of their school fees. In public education all teachers hold PhD or engineer titles so they have more years to think about what they teach than the guy who is only year+2 of the teachee. Edit: I checked Epitech tuition fees, it's around 40k€ for the whole 5 years curriculum.…

Something interesting is that the way Epitech (and 42) work is completely different from what you would have in public schools (at least in France). For example, one key part for me was that the school allowed me to practically don't go to classes as long as I could prove that my work wasn't affected. It's something that you won't find everyday. I'm 100% sure I'd have failed university otherwise because the lack of f…

What you don't realize about Epitech (and other similar private schools) is that the only value you're getting is paying a bunch of millionaires the right to join a selective program.

I graduated from an enginnering school, and you can absolutely skip all classes if you wanted to. Sure, the teachers don't encourage you to do it, but the freedom is definitely there.

BUT, since there will always be a percentage of students who don't succeed in a "traditional" way, a bunch of rich people will always attempt to lure them into a paid program (which is, I repeat, selective). So they learn quite a bit, and they can become high-earners in the future, since they're all hanging out with technically good people.

Re: 42 (school)

#110

Post by arandr0x »

valw wrote: post #93
quadcore wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I believe this is a good method for beginners. A beginner doesn't need to think much because he/she doesn't have the material/experience for that anyway, but instead just practice as much as possible. Later, he/she will reflects on what he/she think he knows and get a more structured…

It really depends on how long you wait before making the students sensitive to these issues. Wait 6 months or 1 year, and you've given them time to gather sufficient experience for motivating a more mindful way of working. Wait 3 years or more, and you've just taught them bad habits. I'm tired of interviewing candidates who were supposedly trained extensively in programming, asking them "how do you approach making qu…

I work with a ton of people from Grandes Ecoles and while I think they're generally great coders, certainly as much so as if they'd spent their whole education madly typing as fast as humanly possible, as juniors they're not much better than the "indent and write lots of comments" level.

I've been to a "regular" university and I'm pretty sure I said some variant of "I write lots of comments" w/r/t my code maintenance approach in a very early interview. I could have written any algorithm you gave me -- but I had no idea what maintaining an application with users entailed.

My experience is you can't really "teach" writing maintainable code beyond just having people fix bugs for 6 months in a million-line codebase that's reasonably well written.

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