Xavier Niel will open a "revolutionary" computer school | Hacker News Reader

Xavier Niel will open a "revolutionary" computer school

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50 pointsgwae22 comments

Given Niel's [nee-ell] outstanding track record, in terms of turning upside-down old markets paralyzed by established fat cats; given how firmly education belongs to this category; and given how badly it needs to be reinvented, this experiment is really intriguing.

For a bit of cultural context, higher education in France works quite differently from the US: it's mostly tax-funded; what we call cheap education is a couple hundreds € a year, full medical insurance included; a very expensive school would be €4-6€ a year. The best schools are cheap (a few select ones even offer a modest salary to their students). The worse ones, "universités", are cheap as well. Expensive schools are in the middle, for kids of wealthy parents who do OK at school, but aren't good enough to pass the best schools' very selective entry competitions.

Of course, these institutions being run by academics and civil servants, they aren't exactly reactive nor modernist; I've recently read a prominent school official explaining that Wikipedia wasn't trustworthy because it was user-editable, as opposed to journalists' papers... They offer a very solid mathematical and scientific background, but usually not much in terms of immediately employable skills. I'm not sure whether it's a good or a bad thing: school ought to teach you what you won't learn by yourself, the rest you'll pick up at your first employment, in exchange for a junior salary. But I've got the impression that schools filter mathematically-gifted student more than they train them.

Niel seems to concur, and to believe that maths/science gifts don't correlate well with actual development skills. Even if it's not true, there certainly are potentially skilled developers who do poorly at maths and science, and this talent pool is totally unexploited today, so he's right to try and valorise it.

For non french speaking people : Xavier Niel is the founder of Free, a major french internet and phone provider, known for kicking hornet nests (he's the "inventor" of low cost unlimited offers, ADSL back in the days, mobile phone very recently.)

42 is a programmer school, totally free of charge, with a "peer to peer" approach to education (whatever it means)

It'll take 4000 students and, after a marathon month (15 hours of programming a day), keeps the 1000 best.

That's pretty much what epitech (Nicolas Sadirac's previous school) is about. The only difference seems to be that epitech is far from free (it's actually quite expensive for a "peer to peer" school, since the students do most of the teaching).

I've been convinced for quite a long that epitech is a scam that just works because of the enormous demand for IT graduates in the industry. Insert money, get a diploma. Making a free version now, that could change things. Color me skeptic but curious.

Disclaimer: I'm a former epitech student, although I dropped out in 3rd year.

Still a 4th year Epitech student, I don't agree with your 'scam' affirmation. I'm pretty sure that I would not have been able to follow traditional schools due to some attention problems, but going to Epitech allowed me to meet a lot of skillful students (including in my own promotion) and get better. Of course it wasn't free, but it was definitely worth it (I will start my first long term contract in may, before getting the diplom).

The concept of 42 is really the same that Epitech (but free), but I'm wondering how they will be able to apply it on a whole new school (since it means that the p2p model will not work for the first promotion, and that there isn't any school network). Furthermore, I'm wondering why it's free. "If you don't pay you're the product". So I'm a bit cautious.

It will not be revolutionary at all for students. You can learn the same at home by coding on Free Softwares, learn everything you need on Stack Exchange and even find a paid job in the end. Don't need to pay an expensive school or going to this "free" one.

It will be revolutionary for startups and other enterprises: in France, the lack of developer is high, and it's painful for startups to find people (searching for one year before you find or even more). I'm sure this is not a free school. Students will be the next Niel's friends employee, they will be inexpensive interns (in France, an internship that longs less than 3 months can legally be unpaid). Enterprises wants people who knows corporates methods and how to work in an "agile" way (I mean agility for business). But employee don't care of business in France.

A real revolution for business, not for students. Developers don't need Niel to make their own revolution.

I didn't catch the "peer-to-peer" part from the article, but that's interesting. (I'm not good with French.)

I understood that it would be based around doing a bunch of projects with peers and learning how to find information on the internet vs. learn it from a course/book.

So, how is this different from being a self-taught programmer? Does the peer interaction help that much? Are there any instructors to guide in any way?

Personally I'm a self-taught programmer (starting at age 10). I had slight pushes from my dad, and some peer influence from high school friends who were also self-taught programmers. Then I went to college and added a bunch of theoretical knowledge and more breadth (topics I didn't think to study) and depth (topics that I didn't care enough about to dive into on my own). Most of my practical ability to work is self-taught or on-the-job experience, but the schooling does help provide a better foundation for it.

So this sounds like it's meant to be a kick-starter to get people to be self-taught who didn't already teach themselves. Or is it more about getting some kind of "degree" so they are hire-able? (Whether a degree is legally necessary or just practically necessary.)

> So, how is this different from being a self-taught programmer? Does the peer interaction help that much? Are there any instructors to guide in any way?

If it's just like Epitech, it means that the teachers will be the students. 2nd-year teaching to 1st-year, etc. It's not as bad as it sounds, since it's possible to pick the 'best candidates'.

Also, I really think that peer interaction helps a lot. You definitely learn something when you have to work with people which does not have the same mindset than yours. You also have to deal with a lot of things such as "do not work with your friends", or "if you fail, the whole group fails", or "always have a leader in a team" etc.

Epitech has all the incentives to be a scam (or higher education as usual, as it's called in the US). Here, since it's free, the only incentive I see for Niel is to have first pick, as an employer, in a pool of young recruits.

He's certainly not a philanthropist, and he's probably smarter than most of us, so he might have ulterior motives that we don't see yet, but it won't be a straightforward "cheap degree for good money" scam.

Epitech is around 8000k/year. I made the 5 years and get a decent job, but I think it's still a scam because you learn in a p2p environment. Teachers and traditional courses are non existent. You code a lot, a lot, a lot, you learn also a lot, but it's not worth 8K euros per year for sure !

42.fr is free...

It's more accurate to say it takes 4000 candidates, and it enrolls the 1000 selected. Not wanting to nitpick, just to clarify a bit.

I know some of the people involved, wish them all the best. Niel, of course, has a maverick reputation, it's a pleasure to follow what he does.

I think this move is very smart: both a great way to give back to society and to find more talent.

15 hours of programming a day? Holy shit. There's no way I could be productive/attentive for that long.

Actually, that's not really 15 hours of programming a day. This period is called "piscine" (swimming pool). That's the same "marathon" as the one you face when you're an epitech student. During your first month at school, you'll learn, from scratch, how to use a UNIX shell and C programming by coding various things, such as some str*() functions and implement various functions for linked lists manipulation. If you've never programmed before, you may spend ~10 hours on this. Else it will just take a few hours. 15 hours is because some exercises can change at the last minute, just before the deadline which is around midnight every day (for example, at the last minute they may ask you to return 42 instead of 1 in some function, and the automated checking script will check whether you return the right value).

O/T Pretty sure that the name 42 must come from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Anyone know differently?

It's definitely this. See the teaser page[1].

[1] http://born2code.fr/

An english language story reporting the same news about this new Parisian developer school "42": http://www.rudebaguette.com/2013/03/26/rumor-confirmed-xavie...

"After that the 4k selected will participate in a coding session (perhaps kind of like a mini hack-a-thon) sometime during the summer, from which 1k “geniuses” will be selected."

Based on what the website and press releases say, it seems like it will be closer to a 1-month long, 15 hours per day coding session. I wouldn't call that a "mini hack-a-thon".

They use the term "piscine" (pool), which is the term already used for a similar training step at Epitech (founded by the same Nicolas Sadirac mentioned in the article), another private tech-focused school based on similar ideas of "code, only code".

Alternate headline: Xavier Opens School for Gifted Youngsters

interesting - the high intensity coding approach did not start with Epitech. It started with Epita, the school created before Epitech. The 15 hours on boarding was called the swimming pool (you learn to swim or you drown). You started that right at the beginning of school with no programming experience. Number of students "giving up" (leaving the school right away) was broadcasted via a Unix based IM system. Goal was only to keep the students who "get it". We would have daily projects to turn in before midnight and most projects names where taken out of the Hitchhiker's. Nicolas is an awesome guy and is very smart as is his right hand Kwame. He was the sys admin for the school and led all the technical curriculum. They are both big believers in learn it / dot it yourself and that's what Nicolas already implemented at Epita as most of the technical classes were led by students. They can be tough but they are great technical mentors. I learned a lot there and I think it was worth the money. I remember that on our first day we had to code 'bdsh' (a light database in bash). I went to them to ask "what is bash?" (because at the time I was barely nailing the login screen). Answer was "man bash". Then I asked "what's man?" - answer was "man man". That's pretty much the approach.

I just wanted to note that I am incredibly, profoundly amazed by how near-flawlessly Chrome translated this article.

rn@42.fr ? That's sound good!

rn is for Root Nicolas. It's a reference to Nicolas Sadirac, his email is rn@epitech.net

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