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Imho , schools like those don't do enough "hard" science, like math, to prepare you for the future.

Have you done enough linear algebra to work on image processing, or with neural networks , and understand the various parameters to tweak the libraries ?

Done enough logic (the math branch) to understand the deep nature , or at least feel the taste of the type systems to come ( scala, haskell and now more and more swift kotlin and rust), or use formal program proofs toolings ?

Enough statistics, physics and algebra to get a hint of what's under the hood of Quantum computers, should they come one day ?

There are CS Engineering schools in France that have a large part of their teaching in "hard" science.

For example, in my school (ENSIIE). I've studied Operational Research, Graph Theory, Logic, Probability, Statistic, Formal Program Proof, and other subjects I don't remember (oups...).

No Quantum Computing in my school however.

But it might be present in better schools like ENSIMAG or Supelec.

The side effect is that these schools tend to be old school in their purely technical teachings. No learning of <fancy JS framework released a weak ago> or how to configure <enterprise stuff> or <fancy cloud provider>, only basic programming skills in C, Java or CPP, SQL, a little assembly, OCaml and some Unix administration skills. By themselves, these schools will not produce code monkeys.

Generally I think you're right, but tbh you don't need to be a MIT class A mathematician physician master to become a great systems engineer. Scala, Rust, Kotlin etc has (to me) the same learning curve as Java and I think most system devs will be able to adopt the languages if they wish to do so.

I had some course about linear algebra, though I agree only the very basics (matrix multiplication etc. but nothing fancy about convolution etc. so I would need to follow a course to be able to implement a raytracer for example)

About neural network, also we didn't learned it, but we learned prolog and lips. And prolog itself was a "mind blowing" moment that I would not have exchanged against quantum physics or more maths.

I'm learning rust right now, so I think it's more about the mindset, the school being here mostly to open up your mind about subjects.

> But I also learned management (how to hold a meeting, how to manage conflict) and project management (Gantt-diagram, Agile and Scrum) and some basis of ITIL

> And even more related to the entrepreneur-ship world I had lessons about copyrights law, labor laws, patent laws , as well as finance course (what is an asset active/passive, what is the difference between giving yourself a salary and giving you shares etc.)

Oh interesting, I thought this was specific to the "Grandes Écoles". For entrepreneurship, this is good. Accounting basics also comes in handy.

But yeah, I make a difference between learning C, SQL, PHP and let's say taking a compiler class, OS class , programming language design, distributed systems, and a database class where you learn the intrinsic of a database.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when such school 'teach you SQL', they teach you about how to operate a SQL database, and do efficient indexing/joins. That itself is very important, but the school makes no effort to demystify a database. Similar to how you demystified processor by building it from scratch (Electrical Engineering is another "old-school" discipline one I think French engineers are good at), I feel learning to demystify many key computer science concepts makes you a better software engineer. And while learning a new language is something you can do on your own time easily, going deep into a compiler creation isn't something easy to do on your own, especially after being out of school.

Some people would argue that lot of this is useless, but to me: Like a civil engineer, where doing matrices operations and second order derivatives by hand at school is never going to be useful later on the job, having the core skills gives you a better intuition on the job.

Sounds like an HBO (higher professional education) in The Netherlands.

Having done a bachelor at an HBO and a masters at a research university (and now doing a PhD at a university in Japan) I can say Computer Science at an HBO is excellent preparation to work as a programmer at a consultancy firm or at a firm doing grunt development work (business app developers, web development, etc.). Like another commenter mentioned, you probably won't easily be able to write code for startups which are doing stuff like robotics and deep learning. However in due time libraries will make it easier for you to work in that area.

Even at the PhD level I sometimes suffer because of not having a very strong background in the mathematics needed to build/use cutting edge technologies. I think most students coming from an HBO would have some problems working at a startup working on some novel tech.

That said, I have met many excellent HBO students who either joined a company and did very novel technical work or went on to be successful in academia. In the end, I guess it depends on your mindset.

I am about to start a software startup in Toulouse, where would you recommend hiring people from?

You mean in term of "where are they graduated from " (which school/uni) ?