[jillav]

I'm pretty skeptical about that kind of school too.

I graduated from an French engineering school and I was taught every-day by researchers and professional engineers. That's what most 18 to 23 year-old kid needs. Structure. I know I needed it. I was a dumb 20 something year old.

Plus, that kind of school focuses too much on programming, as in using programming language, and not enough on computer science and engineering. As a result, much of the kids arriving on the job market don't really have an engineering approach to building software. I've seen people using one programming language for most of their carreer, litteraly afraid of switching to another one.

Some may feel that the job market is saturated by programmers looking for a job but the truth is, in France anyway, not much have a good engineering mind. I've worked in big companies, i've worked in small companies and I've talked to a lot a recruiters. They do interview a lot of people, from university, engineering school and other formation structures. Truth is i've seen big and small companies recruting students that had majored in anything but CS, juste because they came from an engineering school or university that was known to produce good engineers.

Most of those students reavealed themselves to be very talented software engineers. Because they were taught engineering. Not just programming.

Of course, students that had majored in CS from engineering had a great head start, but my point is, the engineer skill is really important on the programmer job and most of those bootcamp school overlook it.

[Gumcher]

Please do not compare EPITECH or 42 to EPITA they are not the same school at all. There is student teaching at EPITA (the idea come from here) but it is framed and supervised by the school and others teachers (and it's only for programming project, not CS courses that are taught by researcher or teacher).

> Some may feel that the job market is saturated by programmers looking for a job but the truth is, in France anyway, not much have a good engineering mind. I've worked in big companies, i've worked in small companies and I've talked to a lot a recruiters. They do interview a lot of people, from university, engineering school and other formation structures. Truth is i've seen big and small companies recruting students that had majored in anything but CS, juste because they came from an engineering school or university that was known to produce good engineers

Can you develop this part I'm curious, how do you make the difference between a good engineering mind and a bad one for example ?

[jillav]

> Can you develop this part I'm curious, how do you make the difference between a good engineering mind and a bad one for example ?

Sure

I'm simply stating what I've been feeling meeting developpers peers the last few years. I've met engineers and I've met tinkerers.

As far as what I've understood, engineering is mostly conception. Given a set a requirements and constraints, the engineer does some thinking and tries to come up with a technical solution that satisfies both requirements and constraints. Much of the time it's about compromising. That requires thinking ahead and anticipating stuff. Whatever the field, CS, aerodynamics or mechanics, the process is basically the same with different time scales. You're given a problem or a need. You have to understand it and its implications. You have to imagine some tool that will solve it. And the tool will exactly solve it. Durably. Efficiently.

Now, sometimes you can see developpers throwing a few lines of codes, assembling (with more or less duct tape) some modules found here and there and then testing it with a few simple cases.

Nothing wrong with that way of doing things. I do it myself on some home-projects of for a Proof Of Concept on the job. I litteraly use duct tape on some robot-arduino-thingy that I build for fun.

This way of doing thing, I call tinkering. And it's needed as much as engineering. Tinkering, DIY, duct taping, it's where new and innovative ideas come from. Because when you tinker you play around. You add this or that just to see what could happen.

But the thing is, when you tinker you don't build to last. And I've seen many developpers building things that way that would be delivered to clients in production.

So maybe when I said "not much have a good engineering mind" I should have said "not much understand the difference beetween DIY and Engineering". Both are needed. The key is to know when and why.

Finally, engineering is taught, yes, but it's a skill that is also and mainly developped with your few first years on the job. Not just in uni. I just feel that It should be a concern of any school that teaches futur developpers. Or a concern of any company that hire freshly out of school students. I know I try to sensibilize my interns to those subjects.