
42 (school) - luu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(school)
======
valw
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
they shoot.

So far, I've always ended up not recruiting the candidates, because they would
have made a mess of the codebase in no time, bringing negative net
productivity to the team (more so than most junior candidates I've seen). And
this was for jobs in a startup!

I wish 42 would teach them the necessary insights to program _sustainably_ \-
that's where teachers and mentors are indispensable, and that's the rare skill
most companies are lacking. Anyone can pick up tutorials and read manuals on
their own. Make them developers, not eternal coding beginners. I'm not asking
for an academic or scientific focus, just a good philosophy of programming in
general, the kind of which you see in SICP for example.

Unfortunately, 42 does not have a monopoly on producing short-sighted
developers in France, by far - that's the case of most "learn to code in X
days/months/years" programs.

~~~
arkh
> To me, this is as silly as training Biathlon athletes to not even aim before
> they shoot.

People should learn this mantra: coding is to software development what moving
pieces is to chess.

~~~
udioron
> 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.

~~~
jl-gitlab
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.

~~~
jki275
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.

------
EZ-E
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 from public schools will say the private
graduates don't have the theorical foundation, and the private graduates will
say the public graduates don't have enough technical skills when they
graduate. In reality the decent students will pick up the theory from the
practical projects and vice-versa.

If that matters, I did Epitech, which is similar-ish to 42 and all the people
that graduated with me have decent positions and are in high demand by the job
market. Some of them in big name companies.

This kind of private schools are a good alternative for people who don't fit
in the public education by letting them just do practical projects with some
direction and let them pick up the theory from there. Some people are really
good self taught hackers but would otherwise drop out in typical education,
but they can shine in these schools. I've met many.

~~~
titanix2
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. You can make _a century_ of studies for the same price in any
public university.

~~~
arcatek
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 freedom would have bored me to death
Conversely, friends of mine have dropped from Epitech in the first two years
because they didn't get enough support, so it shows that the most interesting
thing the school has to offer is its learning devices. They understood that
one size doesn't fit all (which is against the French public school
philosophy).

So yeah, the tuition is expensive (and frankly given how the school works you
sometimes wonder whether they eat luxury cars for lunch), but there's simply
no public alternative.

One other factor I've also wondered is if people paying for their scholarships
weren't more invested in making it a success? I knew my fair share of people
who weren't thriving as developers at Epitech as well, mind you, but most of
them dropped before the end.

~~~
williamdclt
I don't understand, you say they allow to learn at your own pace but don't
offer enough support for those who need it, that certainly sounds like trying
to fit all with one size?

I've done Ensimag, which is a public school in the same sector, and you
definitely could skip classes if you wanted to (though most of the ones who
skipped classes did it out of sloppiness)

~~~
arcatek
I meant "at your own pace" as in "they let you decide how you want to learn
it". Meaning that instead of following classes (which were quite basic anyway)
I spent most of my time reading man pages and reading obscure forums, and they
were perfectly fine with that.

Those who had issues were those who needed to be told where and what exactly
to look for. They often felt like they were paying for little to no teaching
(which is true, in a sense, but I preferred to see it as an opportunity to
grow by myself in an environment where I could have extra resources at my
disposal if I needed to - the best one often being other students, sometimes
from previous years).

~~~
williamdclt
Sure, but that's just a different form of fitting one size for all, where they
assume that every student can learn by themselves.

And once again, all engineering schools considers their students adult enough
to let them do their thing: there's no repercussion if you don't go to
classes, it's not 42-specific

------
monkeynotes
I don't know how anyone has the energy to write code for 50+ hours a week for
a whole year. Surely you have some burn out with that as your base-line
cadence.

I have no doubt _some_ younger people, competitive alpha minds would take this
in their stride, but I worry this culture of hyper competitiveness permeates
into employment. When this stuff is accepted as 'work ethic' and normalized
you tilt toward what some asian cultures are experiencing today - producing
overworked unhappy individuals.

Personally I don't think it's great to brag about how hard you work. I don't
think it's ok to be proud of bootcamps (although 42 School explicitly says
it's not a boot camp which is a little Orwellian). People should be proud of
being healthy, getting enough sleep, eating well, having social interactions,
learning, cultivating well balanced meaningful lives.

To truly be a school of the 21st century we need to do away with this culture
of stress. It's killing the best of us.

~~~
roblabla
Disclaimer: I'm a 42 student.

I agree with this sentiment so damn much. When I joined the school, I was very
afraid that such a rhythm would lead me to a fast burnout.

Thankfully, there's no pressure to do any kind of crazy hours. The school is
open 24/7, and there are no deadlines for projects or whatever. This is a two
edged sword: on one hand, there's an incentive to stay at school as long as
possible, and put in some crazy hours. On the other side, though, it creates a
lot of flexibility for student. If you need to take a breather, you can
totally put in less hours, or even totally stop going for a while. If you need
to do some odd hours, like working a night schedule, that's also possible.

Of course, I have put in some 50+hr in a week sometimes,while hacking away on
a project. But i have also clocked 25hr some weeks. This absolute flexibility
is a real stress relief.

------
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!

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

~~~
LukeB42
> 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

~~~
ElFitz
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.

~~~
v_lisivka
I'm sorry, but if architect cannot make some concrete, i.e. he doesn't know
basics of his profession, what you expect from him? A house?

Yes, you can hire him, but that will cost you lot of money. There are tons of
examples of cheap architect work, e.g. collapsed bridges in the Western
Europe.

~~~
ElFitz
I seriously wonder about the proportion of architects who ever mixed any
concrete themselves in their lives.

Seriously, almost no developer would be able to write a compiler today. The
same way I wouldn't be able to build a micro-processor worth anything.

You wouldn't expect any compiler knowledge from most web (back or front)
developers, the same way you wouldn't expect much GUI or globally distributed
consistent databases knowledge or experience from most embedded developers.

And it's just fine. It's their problem, their limitation, their career, them
missing out and, no, in most cases, it won't impact their jobs or the quality
of what they make in any way.

Why do you have to have a problem with that ?

Edit: also, bridges collapse all over the world. Tunnels too.

~~~
v_lisivka
I'm software developer (backend, fronted, cloud, embedded, etc), but it's
often very helpful to know how hardware works, how processor works, how kernel
works, how compiler works, how network works, and so on, because it's allow me
to make my abstraction at top of all these layers to work much more efficient.
It's not expected that I will be expert in all that, but it's expected that I
will know basics, so I will not make noob mistakes. Are you expecting noob
mistakes from architect, which made your home? Or it's ok if he made mistakes
in someone else home or bridge?

~~~
ElFitz
I'm a software developer too. Mostly mobile and backend.

On the mobile part, most of the clients have pretty much no idea what a
processor really is, or how networks work. Hell, I have to explain to them
that if they want to build this kittens social network, they're going to need
a back-end and that no, it doesn't matter to the mobile apps what language
their back-end is written in (and vice-versa).

For most of what these people ask, all you need to know are the basics of
Android and iOS's SDKs and how to make API calls. Half the time, their isn't
even any networking involved !

I'd be thrilled to work in an environment where this kind of knowledge
matters. But like most people I'm stuck working with some people who'll tell
you that they don't want to be software developers; it's just a means to an
end to them (which is fine. Just don't use that as a shoddy excuse for doing
crap), refactoring codebases built by some kids who don't have any software
architecture knowledge and don't see the problem in their network layers
popping modals and alerts, wondering how on earth a view could end up being a
singleton (and no, "I was somehow convinced I needed to access it and change
it's properties from this class over there" is not a satisfactory answer) or
spend half my day on a single rebase because of some git submodule crap.

So yeah, for most of the people I've had the 'delight' of working with, they
are missing so much that no, hardware intricacies, processors inner working,
compilers logic and functioning or networking knowledge aren't the critical
aspects they're missing.

Heck, I'd be glad if their code was even just readable and had anything
resembling an architecture. Or if they didn't turn everything and anything
into a singleton whenever they felt like it.

I'm going to stop now. But going back to the architects analogy, if these
developers where architects, then most of those I've met can't tell the
difference between plumbing and electrical wiring, so I'd be glad if they left
the concrete to the craftsmen and at least managed the basics of their jobs'
specifics.

~~~
v_lisivka
Software scientist != software/hardware engineer != software/hardware
developer != programmer/coder.

Programmer must know how to _program_.

Software _developer_ must know how to make good software _product_.

Software engineer must know how to understand and meet _specifications_ ,
follow engineering codex, and son on.

And so on.

I'm talking about software _developers_. You are showing me examples unrelated
to professional software product development at all. Moreover, there are lot
of professionals in IT, but only part of them are software developers.

So we are just talking about different things: you are talking about "someone
who sits in front in compute and enters programming code", while I'm talking
about professional Software Developer, short segment of IT professionals,
subset of programmers.

~~~
ElFitz
You are pretty much making my point, you know that, right ?

I'm talking about people who are one of the or the only persons with any
technical knowledge in their companies, _who 's job it is to interpret and
understand whatever the requirements are and deliver on the products_, wether
it's apps, web or mobile, back-ends or both.

They _need_ to know how to make good software _products_ , they definitely
_should_ know how to understand and meet specifications, etc, etc, etc. _They
just don 't_. And yet, they have the positions they have. And what they're
most lacking, contrary to the point you were making earlier, definitely isn't
compiler theory or the ability to build shell scripting parsers, _but the very
abilities you just listed._

So no, _we are talking about the exact same thing_ , you just seem lucky
enough not to have encountered this kind of people in that kind of position,
and I'm glad we have _finally_ come to an understanding.

~~~
v_lisivka
Of course, I know such people. They are called "anykeyers" in my country. And
of course, they are not software developers or software engineers.

If they have no education/training adequate to their profession, they are just
amateurs. I trained about few dozens of them during my career.

We have outsourcing industry in Ukraine, so "Software Developer" is well
defined term here. Somebody cannot sit five years playing with Excel, or
JS/HTML, or mobile apps and then pretend for Senior Developer salary.
Inexperienced (junior) developers causes lots of problems to project and must
be supervised by a senior developer. We work on tight budgets, so we have no
time to play name games. If someone has "developer" in his title, he must meet
expectations for his role. Otherwise, project will collapse and everyone will
suffer.

------
gjmacd
"The candidates must be between 18 and 30 years of age (18 - 45 in Silicon
Valley).[14] No previous diploma is required."

Age discrimination at its best. Cap it at 45?

How many people over 30 (45 in the US) are trying to retool and get educated
on programming?

~~~
ahuibers
The older copy of the US site at
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180206011840/https://www.42.us...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180206011840/https://www.42.us.org/42-admissions-
overview-requirements-process/faq/) is very clear: "I AM NOT BETWEEN THE AGES
OF 18 AND 30. CAN I COME TO 42? No. While we do not have anything against
those who are over 30 years old, when opening a new location, we have decided
to concentrate our where they can be the most efficient and where we have a
great deal of experience."

On the current site this is changed to: "You can apply to 42 if you’re older
than 45, but please know that most students here are younger and that
Intensive Basic Training is tiring."

Hardly encouraging.

The french site [http://www.42.fr/](http://www.42.fr/) says "ouverte à tous et
accessible aux 18-30 ans" (18-30 only)

Draw your own conclusions about age discrimination here. You are free to
apply...

~~~
avip
Have you tried applying to a publicly funded phd program or med school @age >
45?

~~~
BeetleB
I don't know about PhD, but I know several who went to med school after the
age of 40. Lots of weird midlife crises out there.

~~~
my_usernam3
I know I could see myself wanting a PhD if I suddenly made enough money to
finance the rest of my life.

------
zapita
I am very happy about this trend of project-oriented, deferred-tuition
programming trade schools. So far I know of:

\- 42 (France and Bay Area)

\- Lambda School (online)

\- Holberton (Bay Area)

\- There is also Epitech (France) which is the "ancestor" of both Holberton
and 42. They don't defer tuition, but have the same project-oriented, TA-
intensive curriculum.

It's still early and all these schools have their strengths and weaknesses...
But I think this is a positive trend. It makes tech education more accessible
to a lot more people, and can produce quality engineers. It's definitely much
better than the horrible coding bootcamps popping up everywhere, that charge 5
figures and leave you completely unprepared for a software development career.

~~~
thomasbachem
Absolutely!

There's also

\- Make School (Bay Area)

\- CODE (Berlin) [I'm one of the founders]

------
mattferderer
This is cool to see as I once owned the domain school42.com because I wanted
to build something similar but more focused on allowing teachers to do 1 on 1
teaching in a large group setting. Ideally I felt if teachers could see all
their students work using something like Web Sockets, they could visit 1 on 1
either digitally or physically when a student was having trouble. Since this
was a digital platform, you could set up simple triggers to determine if a
student might be struggling.

I dug up some really old notes that referenced my reasoning for the name.

"42 is the number used to define the meaning of life, learning is also
arguably the meaning of life. It also sounds like school for 2 (teacher &
student). This will hopefully help one to one learning."

------
cnasc
Some previous meta-discussion about a reddit post that made some very critical
claims about 42:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189670](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189670)

~~~
travmatt
I’m a current student at 42, myself and my fellow students all had a pretty
good laugh at much of their comments. We didn’t really see an accurate
representation of our school, and much of it came across as a bitter student
who wasn’t accepted.

For example, there is a cat at the Paris campus and the students are asked to
ignore it and not pet it. That guidance turned into the ‘rule’ that if ‘the
cat touches you, you fail’. I promise the school doesn’t have a secret failure
cat.

I’m referring to the reddit link, not the HN comments.

~~~
mygo
why not pet a cat?

what did the cat do to them?

is 42 anti cat?

just kidding. see how easily conspiracy theories form?

~~~
solarkraft
damn cat haters.

~~~
mygo
I once wrote a purely academic article about election map data visualization
and after it got picked up by Fast Company it was amazing how some people in
the comments were convinced that it was written to further some sort of
political agenda. Just sitting there reading that made me go wow, I wonder
what I’ve been lead to believe from the outside looking in that is just flat
out unfounded

------
tripue
There is a bunch of successful companies led by graduate from theses kind of
school. Check out vente privée CTO. Another example could be the core team
that developed docker that was from there as well.

~~~
valw
Sure, but this doesn't tell us anything about the role 42 played in these
successes - there's also a fair number of successful entrepreneurs without any
higher education, should we infer from it that no education is the key to
success?

~~~
tripue
Docker was a school project at the origin. The CTO of vente privée said in
multiple interview how he use to be challenged in his previous school.

------
hycaria
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 employment agency, or even better an apprenticeship.

Consulting firms hire science graduates and train them to be developers. I
went that way, switched for a small company after a few months where I am
better tutored. Some friends stayed in consulting and still improve. Sure the
pay is low in consulting firms, but it is immediate and you build professional
experience directly instead of wasting 3+ years.

Doing 42 when you already have a degree sounds like a waste of time to me. I
guess it's fine if you're 18 and need guidance though. But I'd still prefer
prepa and engineering schools over 42...

~~~
namdnay
> except if you're a fresh high school graduate

That's their main source of students, no?

------
0xferruccio
For anyone that is considering attending the school I recommend reading also
some criticism:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/91bjlr/sc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/91bjlr/school_42_is_a_borderline_cultopinion/)

That being said I met some super smart people from 42 that had built extremely
interesting and technically challenging projects! For example a first year
student I met had built a 3d rendering engine in C without using any external
library.

~~~
alain94040
This is at least the second time someone posts this link. I read it the first
time, and found it not convincing: that person failed to get in, is telling a
bunch of second hand stories that are probably wildly exaggerated. Not much to
see there...

------
0xb100db1ade
I have gone to several hackathons at 42. It is quite a nice campus, really
well maintained.

It's much bigger than you'd think and the supervisors are happy to let
visitors explore

------
unknownkadath
It sounds like an interesting experiment, though I agree with other posters
about the age cap.

A school named 42 that would not accept Douglas Adams as a student, were he
still around. Ha!

------
thomasbachem
Somewhat related to this, we founded
[https://code.berlin](https://code.berlin), an accredited university in Berlin
with strictly project-based, interdisciplinary and self-directed 3-year
Bachelor programs in Software Engineering, Interaction Design and Product
Management.

We're in our 2nd year now, with 230 students from more than 40 nations. We've
partnered with 42 US for student exchange last summer, and it was an awesome
experience for our students who went there.

~~~
icebraining
You should post it to HN! I see it has been posted once before, but that was
over a year ago, it's perfectly fine to post again.

~~~
thomasbachem
Thanks, will do :) I'll just wait until November when we reopen applications
for next year.

------
__initbrian__
Any 42 silicon valley grads here on HN? How was it?

~~~
tmacro
I graduated from 42 in April. I moved here with no prior work experience in
tech, and got a developer job in a little under a year. The curriculum is
mostly C based which can be a little tedious, but you do learn programming
from the ground up.

------
baby
There is 101 as well: [https://www.le-101.fr/](https://www.le-101.fr/)

------
nikisweeting
Sounds somewhat similar to [https://www.recurse.com](https://www.recurse.com)

~~~
baby
totally different. 42 is a real school with a, I believe, 3-year program.

~~~
nikisweeting
I'm not saying it's the same, I'm saying they share a similar ethos:

"The school does not have any professors, does not issue any diploma or
degree, and is open 24/7\. The training is inspired by new modern ways to
teach which include peer-to-peer pedagogy and project-based learning."

~~~
baby
still completely different, at recurse you are free to choose whatever you
want to do, whereas 42 has lists of exercises, challenges and exams that you
must go through.

------
throwawaycanada
Too bad I'm over 30.

~~~
travmatt
There’s no age restrictions for the Silicon Valley campus, you’re more than
welcome to apply.

~~~
gjmacd
45 is the cap.

~~~
Joky
Why not look at the source to get the right information?
[https://www.42.us.org/42-admissions-overview-requirements-
pr...](https://www.42.us.org/42-admissions-overview-requirements-
process/admissions-requirements/) [https://www.42.us.org/42-admissions-
overview-requirements-pr...](https://www.42.us.org/42-admissions-overview-
requirements-process/faq/)

> I AM NOT BETWEEN THE AGES OF 18 AND 45. CAN I COME TO 42?

> Yes! We are looking for learners who are motivated. In establishing the
> school in the US, we focused first on the age range we’re familiar with,
> then expanded to include high school, and will continue to expand. It’s
> important to develop a program that supports the success of students while
> still challenging them. You can apply to 42 if you’re older than 45, but
> please know that most students here are younger and that Intensive Basic
> Training is tiring.

~~~
thx4allthestuff
For what it’s worth, I’ve been absolutely smoked in 5k races by people who
were 40+. Instead of offending those people by implying they don’t have the
stamina to keep up, just say no. People respect “no.” No one respects
disingenuous language.

~~~
tw1010
It's likely illegal to "just say no".

