jrbancel

> That doesn't say much about the quality of the curriculum

I agree.

However, this thread is not about the schools themselves, but their output, the graduates (c.f. parent and GP: "produce monkey coders", "yield better results").

It is not elitism. I know several developers from Epitech that are very very good at what they do. However, they can't be compared with graduates from the top grandes écoles, simply because none of these grandes écoles focus as much as Epitech on training developers. It is a broader education. As a result, graduates from grandes écoles can work pretty much everywhere and most of them don't actually work in tech (usually finance, management consulting, etc...). Epitech graduates can't.

Graduates from Epitech, or 42, are very far from having the same ability with mathematics and quantitative sciences in general. That being said, it probably doesn't matter since most tech projects don't require such skills.

> How do people cope without a decent terminal?

Try cmder (http://gooseberrycreative.com/cmder/).

Some of the features: tabs, most Unix commands available, git integration and the default font and color theme are very good.

I don't think it would impact recent graduates as much as you think. The H1-B program is mainly criticized because of these consultancies importing cheap workers to the U.S. and applying for 10,000's of visa every year. I don't know anyone that complains about immigrants that are employed by top companies such as Google, Palantir, etc... These companies pay top salaries even to new employees without experience. I am sure they would be granted most of the visas they would request if salary was a criteria.

I took this class when I was in graduate school at Harvard. The methods introduced in this course can be used in virtually every domain. I think everyone involved with some sort of data processing should have at least minimal knowledge of Bayesian inference, simulated annealing, data augmentation, sampling, etc...