
This French tech school has no teachers, no books, no tuition - joubert
http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/13/this-french-tech-school-has-no-teachers-no-books-no-tuition-and-it-could-change-everything/?hn=true
======
koolkat
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
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?

~~~
fab13n
> This French tech school has no teachers [...] Yet to succeed in that case
> you used the Harvard teacher information

I don't think anyone imagines that human beings can educate themselves into
pushing the state-of-the-art in technology, especially in the XXI-th century,
without benefiting from actively transmitted knowledge from former
generations.

What's disrupted by 42 isn't the concept of mature people helping younger ones
acquire knowledge and later expand it; it's the school setup, its organisation
around academic authority, its mass production mentality (use exams to filter
uniform kids--socially and intellectually--as input, so that you produce
normalized batches graduates as output, through a highly scalable and
repeatable process). The teacher's knowledge, and his ability to condense it
into a synthetic form (here a book), remains as valuable as before, if not
more. Teachers currently have to use the Ivy league bureaucracy in order to
turn those skills into a livelihood, but that can be changed.

Schools destroy kids' curiosity and self-confidence, although those are the
best individual learning drivers. That's not (only) willful sabotage: the
problem is, those drivers are well suited for tailor-made education, but
they're considered unmanageable to handle batches of hundreds or thousands of
kids. What 42 questions is: can't we claim those drivers back, now that
Internet has deeply altered how humans can interact? I'm thrilled to see the
answers they come up with.

------
vmarsy
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%A9coles#List_of_graduate_engineering_schools_.28grandes_.C3.A9coles_d.27ing.C3.A9nieurs.29)

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

~~~
song
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
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
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.

~~~
agumonkey
Fair enough, I was too quick to judge.

------
lazyant
> 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.

~~~
eloisant
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-don...](http://www.19h59.com/WTF/10238_Le-directeur-de-
lecole-42-donne-des-fessees-une-fille)

~~~
1337biz
What's the deal with the spanking story? Is that part of some private sexual
education tutoring? I guess only in France somebody is able to keep his job
after something like that.

~~~
navaati
It's no big deal, the girl was not a student. It's just the director thinking
he's at home in the school. We 42 students are a little bit pissed off (we
fear some misinformed parents forbid their kid to attend the school because of
this), but mostly wildly amused by this story.

------
pol0nium
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
If you or anyone can suggest a less misleading title, we can change it.

~~~
pol0nium
It should be a bit more nuanced but I don't have a better suggestion.

------
exceptione
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
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.

~~~
gohrt
zuckerberg doesn't have any relevant computer science or non-basic programming
skills (page has ~4 years more relevant computer science background that
motivated google.com algorithm), and 99.99% of people in any of these schools
are not going be the next zuck or page. facebook was one of dozens of social
networks that were poppping up in the 2000s, and its success had more to do
with investor and hiring connections then anything special about the original
product.

For both zuck and page, their uncommon technical accomplishments came from
people they hired: a small army of very-well-educated engineers with
traditional education.

~~~
agumonkey
How was Page and Brin paper on web indexing by graph connectivity received
back in the days ? I get that being PhD students, paper reference numbers may
be a simple thing to imagine and realize. But it was still a lot better than
the technical foundation of common web search at that point. I think I
remember only altavista used crawlers + index, and may not have ideas like
page connectivity to sort results, while other websites being only hand
collected directories.

------
Dralon
(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
> 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 :)

~~~
xeope
> 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 ?

~~~
zipeldiablo
Why having an english or french class when the school is actually paying so we
can follow online course on a website like babel??? (don't remember the name).
Truth is some people are lazy and don't want to bother learning another
language.

~~~
xeope
It's optional. It does not give credits/point/xp whatever if you do it. So
they don't go on it. Sometimes they may not know the existence of this thing.

------
hme
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
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.

------
GhiGt
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
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
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
> 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
The "Ecole normal superieur" of the Ulm Street takes only 11 students in CS.
So yes, in comparison, 42 accepts anyone.

------
yodsanklai
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
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)

~~~
palunon
>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).

The ENS is a special case, as it does not wish to form engineers, but
researchers.

------
uniclaude
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
> 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
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
The people participating in the Google hashcode contest for any school do not
have graduated from that school yet.

------
r0naa
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.

------
S4M
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.

------
smsm42
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
"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
Mentorship from peers may lead to a "blind leading the blind" situation. I'd
prefer some experience/knowledge transfer involved.

------
peferron
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
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!

------
jokoon
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
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
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.

------
tienthanh8490
Anyone knows where to find some sample projects from this school ?

~~~
pandark
[http://wolf3d42.tumblr.com/](http://wolf3d42.tumblr.com/)
[http://raytracer42.tumblr.com/](http://raytracer42.tumblr.com/)

------
zipeldiablo
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
Hi. Does knowing only English allow you to feel comfortable in 42, or French
is mandatory?

~~~
zipeldiablo
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.

------
eva1984
So basically, it is a big/free internet cafe?

------
userbinator
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.

------
aikah
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.

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

------
metasean
>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
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?

------
pinaceae
...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....

------
jarnix
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
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.

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

