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Comment by mickeyben | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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).

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.

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.

Fair enough, I was too quick to judge.

That sounds about right, although it does indicate how programming jobs are fairly different from traditional engineering jobs. What you describe with new graduates is not far from what engineering companies have traditionally actually wanted. The expectation is that the university teaches the fundamentals, both "pure" fundamentals like math and physics, and also classes of techniques like finite-element modeling. But becoming proficient with applying a specific finite-element-modeling package within the context of a particular engineering domain, workflow, and procedures: that's more the responsibility of a new-hire training program. Of course completely new graduates will typically take longer to get up to speed than people with years of work experience in a similar job, but that's also why junior engineers get paid less.

>> RTFM is the motto of the school.

That sounds like theory, probably closer to RTFSO (read the fucking Stack Overflow)

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