Slashdot Mirror
Billionaire Launches Free Code College in California (arstechnica.com)
Xavier Niel is the billionaire founder of France's second-largest ISP. In February he bought a former campus from DeVry University, and tried building something better.
Slashdot reader bheerssen writes: 42 US is a free coding school near Facebook's headquarters in Fremont, California. The courses are boot camp like experiences that do not offer traditional degrees, but hope to provide programming skills and experience to students for free.
Ars Technica calls it "a radical education experiment" -- even the dorms are free -- and the school's COO describes their ambition to become a place "where individuals from all different kinds of backgrounds, all different kinds of financial backgrounds, can come and have access to this kind of education so that then we can have new kinds of ideas." Students between the ages of 18 and 30 are screened through an online logic test, according to the article, then tossed into a month-long "sink or swim" program that begins with C. "Students spend 12 or more hours per day, six to seven days per week. If they do well, students are invited back to a three- to five-year program with increasing levels of specialty."
Ars Technica calls it "a radical education experiment" -- even the dorms are free -- and the school's COO describes their ambition to become a place "where individuals from all different kinds of backgrounds, all different kinds of financial backgrounds, can come and have access to this kind of education so that then we can have new kinds of ideas." Students between the ages of 18 and 30 are screened through an online logic test, according to the article, then tossed into a month-long "sink or swim" program that begins with C. "Students spend 12 or more hours per day, six to seven days per week. If they do well, students are invited back to a three- to five-year program with increasing levels of specialty."
Thousands of slashdotters claim you can't write code with out a full BS in CS when we know that not to be the case.
Yeah, sure, you can learn to code in a few weeks or months. You can learn to operate a hammer and a chisel in a few minutes. That doesn't mean you're capable of actually producing anything worthwhile with either. Listen, learning the syntax of a programming along with some algorithms, data structures and design patterns is a nice start but it's only a start. The real challenge is being able to wrap your head around a particular problem domain. People with 4 year CS degrees have demonstrated they can do that (at least if they went to most schools). Sure, some boot camp graduates can too but not nearly as many as you think.
The bottom line is this, you along with many other people before you have naively confused the tool with what can be done with the tool. The tool is easy to familiarize yourself with. Applying it competently to build something somebody will pay you for is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
Except for the details
Details like Facebook's headquarters are in Menlo Park, not Fremont, with the SF Bay in between?
Putting a school like this in the SF Bay Area, where there are already oddles of opportunities, isn't doing much. If he wanted to make a difference, maybe he should have opened his school in West Virginia, or the Mississippi Delta.