[mtourne]

Typical french elitism. Part looking down at "lesser schools", part afraid of a model that might be different and yield better results.

Docker comes to mind, as a silicon valley success story founded entirely by monkey coders.

[djulius]

Sorry for using monkey coders term, just took it back from the original comment. My comment was not meant to be elitist at all. I know that Epitech/Epita produces lot of great coders, no problem with that.

The thing is that the french system lacks a proper CS education. "Grandes Ecoles" has the best student but offers pretty limited courses in CS (except maybe TPT, not that sure) and not that much coding experience. Universities are the only offering deep theory education and sometimes good coding experience but their degree are not well recognized so they don't attract good students. As a consequence private schools try to fill the gap by offering a great education in programming, however lacking the CS foundation.

[jrbancel]

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.

[mtourne]

By saying this you're implying that it is a school that teaches you only one skill, versus teaching you how to teach yourself new skills. Or that the people who attend such school don't have the mental structure to do so.

Are you considered more apt to be a leader, or qualified to be a finance quant (even if you never trained for it) with a top school or your resume ? Yes you absolutely are.

Also "most of them don't actually work in tech". Yes, that. Programming is considered a dirty job in France by most people from grandes ecoles. They would all rather be architects or consultants. It sounds better on the business card. But someone needs to actually do the job. And this is why there are only tech services companies, but nothing close to a Google.

[peferron]

The top grandes écoles have the best math/physics students coming in. These students are obviously likely to also be the best math/physics graduates coming out.

The only way that wouldn't happen is if the grandes écoles brainwashed their students into stupidity, while Epitech and 42 had a time-distorted super saiyan training chamber.

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

[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").