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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."
at least they'll be prepared for the coding sweatshops of the silicon valley
Sounds like age discrimination, to me.
There must be thousands of older people between the ages of 30 and 55 whom are equally capable of contributing - and many of them already know how to program.
~childo
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.
(emphasis mine)
Question is: How do they make their money? Because I just do not believe there's no catch!! Anyone care to elaborate?
If ever there was an example of ageism in tech...
Franceâ(TM)s
And the walk of shame continues... bling bling bling! (https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9511599&cid=52681371)
I hate Perl, but even I know that you could solve (palliatively) this disgrace with a simple:
$post =~ s/â\(TM\)/'/g;
Or just use SoylentNewsâ(TM) [yeah, it was on purpose] version of Rehash, as they fixed this ages ago.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Finally, someone stateside is filling the gap between nothing and a full CS degree.
Cooper Union was established by the industrialist Peter Cooper in the 19th century and until recently also had a free tuition. It was established for the same reasons: lack of skilled labor needed by the industrialists in New York. The school has 3, essentially independent, divisions: art, architecture and engineering. While their ability to offer free very high quality education (Cooper Union was ranked 1st among engineering schools by US News for many years) has diminished, the idea was still pioneered in the 19th century. So it's not all that revolutionary.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Is throwing quantity at this problem the right answer? If we train lots and lots of people in programming is it really going to help? Is it even going to be successful? How can people believe in this approach?
If someone opened a massive free school for training sculptors and enrolled 1000s of students no one would believe that they would end up with hundreds of Michelangelo's. They wouldn't get lots and lots of excellent sculptors. They'd be lucky to find a 1 or 2 really good ones out of every 1000 students. Then they'd find a few more fairly good ones and the rest would be mediocre to bad. Some would be able to create really elegant statues, some would be good at making blocks, bricks and tombstones and the vast majority would make gravel.
The only difference between this and the mass programming schools is that with sculpting most people could look at their rock based product and easily discern its quality. Not so for programming. That's why this industry is rife with gravel producing developers who try and pass their product off as statuary.
I think the public is being deluded about this.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Why is it limited to ages 18-30?
#Ageism
"42 US" reproduces the "42" school created in November 2013 in France. I still have no opinion on that experiment, but at least US students can expect organizational details to be sorted out, since it was already done elsewhere.
You answered the first question out of my mouth, when you noted that it was not accredited.
As a proud owner of Photoshop, I now have a "Certificate of Completion" from them.
When do they open, exactly, so I know when to put it on my resume?
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.
Release all the education materials and the lesson recordings online for free for anyone and everyone not rich enough to move there or live there.
True freedom is to give it to everyone everywhere.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
More details like "not offering traditional degrees". Then what kind of degree are they offering? I know of a cult or two that run their own "education" systems that produce an education that is mostly bullshit and not useful in anyway except within their own little bubble of a world, that way the kids have no choice but stay in the cult since, well, outside nobody really has any use for them.
I hope this isn't that kind of bullshit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm good, I have a lot of "IT security professional" certificates from various places. Some of them even have an office.
Frankly, there isn't as much snakeoil in the rest of the IT industry as in security alone.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oh please, the US has always been for sale. Why don't you like capitalism, what are you, a pinko commie?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How is someone between 18 and 30 supposed to survive long enough to do this program - one that doesn't even give you an accredited piece of paper - if they're doing 12 hour days 6-7 days a week?
My bet is that after the trial period, the "survivors" will be doing 3 to 5 years of commercial coding for free as their "lessons". That's shittier than an internship.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
He is probably more interested in the public echo than in actually helping anybody.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In basically all cases it is "no traditional degree" == "no degree".
The graduates (well, sort-of) will have nothing they can use to pursue a regular job, so they are tied in wage-slavery to the few companies that hire people from this institution. The "test" at the start with 72...84h work weeks is a dead giveaway as well as to what the "quality" of this education will be.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I need the programming equivalent of electricians and plumbers, not engineers.
Is that really possible for programming though? I am doubtful you can really separate things to that degree. Even maintenance (especially maintenance?) requires advanced skills not to screw things up as you go, and advanced skills are also needed to create something solid that performs well and does not collapse...
To use your analogy, what is sometimes an electrician came because of a power outage but found that equipment in the house connected to the electric lines needed new power supplies built? Well then you'd be pretty damn sorry you didn't have an EE.
That's what makes programming hard, is that to be good you need to be the engineer AND the plumber/electrician. If you are not you will mess something up on the either end or for the group of people you are not in.
There are people out there still manually sorting Excel documents set on retirement. Those jobs need taken and they need to be filled by people that know how to do a for loop.
But know nothing about floating point, and in ten years as the numbers drift there will be a reckoning...
Not one that has 2 semesters of Linear Algebra and a compilers class.
Like I said, turns out in ten years that was the one you needed after all, and your short-sightedness caused calamity (and more work for the competent so thanks for that I guess).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Contextual problem solving skills.
Big picture thinking.
Or
"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."
Also, I find it odd that he focuses on the C language.
Not that there is anything wrong with the C language, but the market for C developers is not currently that good because there is already an overabundance of C developers right now for the number of C projects out there.
Another one that started the same way is Carnegie Mellon University
I think the idea is that if you're capable of learning C, the other languages will seem pretty simple. (e.g. you don't wanna hire `programmers' who get confused by pointers)
Has that ever worked out for you as an employee or as a manager?
That notion might work in some sort of model meritocracy but that's not what we live in but a long stretch. Most companies (and even managers) want more relevant experience and won't trust that you can "just adapt".
This is probably even more true for a "bootcamp".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
So, this looks very interesting. If I hadn't noticed that this course was going to begin by teaching C, I would have assumed it was just another one of these crappy coder bootcamps that will be around until the Web 2.0 bubble pops. These places stuff newbies' heads full of "RESTful AngularNodeRuby on Rails in Docker container microservices" with zero backstory and expect them to turn out useful work. They existed in 1999 as well, but back then it was HTML and MCSE bootcamps.
The whole "educational deathmarch" thing is an issue for me. I work in a normal job for a normal company, but I've now seen two dotcom-style bubbles forming around the Silicon Valley 100+ hour work week ethos. The more new people are conditioned to work these insane hours and never settle down, the worse off the industry as a whole will be. I now see normal companies starting to say "we need to be more like Facebook/Google." In come the Nerf toys and beanbag chairs, free food and the 100 hour work weeks. The reality is that most people have lives outside of work and it's unhealthy to not have downtime.
It'll be interesting to see (a) what they turn out given that they're starting with a more fundamental base than the usual creaky tower of JavaScript newbies these days learn, and (b) how long before the whole thing folds up when the demand for cheap web monkeys goes back down to normal levels.
There are few or no computer jobs in West Virginia or Missippi Delta and a shortage of instructors. They give free rooms, so for the price of a bus ticket an enterprising rural student could give it a go....
love is just extroverted narcissism
And you get what you pay for.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
To be honest, since there is very little tangible in some fields of IT that you can cover sensibly with a degree, I'd sometimes actually prefer people to show me some prior work to a sheet of paper. Personally, I'd value being able to point to something that made an impact in the field and say "that was me" higher than formal education that may or may not be relevant to what my business is doing. And in most areas in IT this is still very possible, unlike in, say, pharmacy or biotechnology where the entry cost is so steep that you can't get anywhere "on your own".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd like to see how many people getting in this program are also H1B holders, and supposedly already know how to code since they've been hired to do so.