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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

I've always been suspicious about those schools. Computer science is far more than just "coding". While I'm sure many cool projects can be done with patience and motivation, there is also a lot of fundamental knowledge that is hard to acquire just by doing unsupervised coding projects.

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Be careful, it's more of an accelerated natural selection than a school.

The postulate of 42 is that talented people will acquire this fundamental knowledge no matter what, and that non-talented people will simply drop out of school. The big idea is to make sure that people with a gift for programming, no matter where they come from or what they did before, become highly productive and achievement-driven. The rest better pack up and go do something else.

That's also one of the reasons why the school is free. Dropping out and failing should be as quick and painless as possible for both the school and the student.

I've always been suspicious about those schools. Computer science is far more than just "coding".

The difference between a CS degree and a coding bootcamp is very similar to the difference between being a computer scientist and a developer. In my 20 years of development so far I've never implemented a doubly linked list or designed a search algorithm.

> In my 20 years of development so far I've never implemented a doubly linked list or designed a search algorithm.

You probably target a non-constrained platform, even so, as both a web developer(!) and a CS graduate, I've had plenty of scenarios where using the right data structure and/or algorithm give better perf and/or cleaner code. Sometimes I just use the very handy hash table and call it a day, but having the tools at my disposals is useful.

But you don't need computer science to get and perform very well in a programming job. I'm a sample size of one, but I never had any formal comp-sci education and only after about a decade in the industry did I go back and teach myself algorithms, data structures, and all the other comp-sci stuff. I only did this out of interest, not necessity. My experience is not unique.

Likewise... I do find that understanding some of the fundamentals helps, but isn't key to most of the work I do by far... brute force of faster computers and loads of memory goes a long way for line of business applications, which is most of software development (what most work on, not most-used).

You are absolutely right. In France CS is often learned in "engineering schools" which are generally almost free but are also very selective (you generally have to pass one of the hard preparatory school competitive exams). The main difference 42 school has is that they are much less selective (if at all?) and of course the level at the end is much more random than an engineering school [1]. Btw I am not sure how it works in other countries, but in France they are not allowed to deliver "engineer titles" (I believe they actually do not deliver any real degree at all) which make it very clear that when you hire someone from 42, you are hiring a coder, not an engineer. That said, that might be exactly what you want, and I believe 42 was born precisely because of the lack of coders. We have also had very pleasant surprises and some of our hires from 42 are actually very good.

[1]source: hiring / interviews

What is an "engineer" in CS supposed to do?

There are plenty of instances where CS is an engineering discipline... mainly control and medical systems that interface with real-world, often moving, components in critical environments.

I wouldn't want someone without an engineering CS background designing missile guidance systems, nuclear reactor safety controls or hospital devices. Other areas (automotive, aerospace) should mostly be on this side as well, but I feel there should be some room for independent innovators.

But aren't there other engineering careers for those devices you talked about? Like electrical, electronic,mechanical etc.

There are videos to follow. And you have your peers to ask questions.

The only thing missing is the opportunity to ask question directly to the instructor. But doesn't many students graduate without interacting with the instructor in traditional school?

Yes, but in general there is high interaction with TAs who are usually graduate students who are much more familiar with the material than other students and often the professors.

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