42 Luxembourg. Even if you don’t already know what it is, you might have seen posters or online ads for it. It was launched last year amid a strong promotional push, and it is an important part of Luxembourg’s efforts to build up its tech sector, as well as a perhaps surprisingly open door to a whole different life for you.
42 Luxembourg is, in short, a coding school – it’s a bricks-and-mortar institution of higher education dedicated exclusively to computer programming, located in the Belval quarter of Esch-sur-Alzette. At the same time, it is a partner campus of the 42 Network. There are, at present, 54 partner campuses in 31 countries around the world. The first, 42 Paris, was established in 2013 by the French tech billionaire Xavier Niel and several former executives at the computer science school Epitech. The course is exactly the same irrespective of which campus you’re at.
Why that name? Well, somewhat unusually for an institution of higher education, 42’s name derives from a joke in a comedy sci-fi novel/radio series. A famous joke, I grant. In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, mice design a great, city-sized computer by the name of Deep Thought to work out the meaning of life. After seven and a half million years of calculation, Deep Thought announces the answer is 42.
It is, however, far from just the name that is unusual about 42. Start with the most obvious things: 42 is completely free to attend. 42 has almost no entrance requirements. Oh and it has no teachers or classes either. Let’s go through those one by one.
First, the money. There is no admission or course fee, and students are also not required to buy any equipment or other course materials. The funding for the physical site, the computers, the administration, etc. has different sources from one 42 campus to another. In some cases, like Paris, it comes from private philanthropy; in some cases, from tech companies – e.g. Telefónica funds four 42 campuses in Spain; in Luxembourg’s case, it comes entirely from the Ministry of Education. Granted, the state’s generosity here – or its investment – does not cover accommodation for students, and, while food is subsidised at some nearby eateries, there are still all the other typical living expenses for students to bear.
Second, the entry requirements. You must be at least 18 years old to attend, and, aside from that, you must simply do well enough at each stage to justify your presence on the course. You start – in fact, you can start right now – by doing a few thinking skills tests on the 42 website to establish your minimal aptitude. With that established, you are invited to take part in an intensive one-month onsite trial course known as the Piscine. The idea is that, through the Piscine, both you and 42 will discover whether coding and, just as importantly, 42’s educational methodology are a good fit for you. If you pass the Piscine, you’re admitted to the so-called Common Core, and you can take up to 2 years to complete that, though students usually take 12-18 months, and 8 months is not impossible. Having completed the Common Core, you can take your certificate and leave or, if you prefer, continue to a specialisation phase, the timeline for which is even more flexible. 42’s website says that ‘on average, students integrate into the job market after 3 years’.
Third, the lack of teachers and classes. Basically, you sit at a computer and work your way, somewhat as if playing a video game, through a series of increasingly challenging exercises. When you struggle, you can do some research and/or ask for help from your fellow students, who likewise will, sooner or later, be asking you for help. You and your fellow students will also, through a clever system, have to assess each other’s work and provide feedback. There’ll be some group projects to do together as well. Unorthodox this education system may be, it draws significantly on the system that some of 42’s founders have worked with at Epitech, and its basic pillars are handily captured by established pedagogical terms: peer-to-peer learning and evaluation, learning-by-doing, gamification and learning to learn.
Now, does it work? What, to take one obvious measure, are the employment prospects for graduates? The Luxembourg campus had its first Piscine in November, and its first Common Core started only in January, but managing director Serge Linckels says the demand from employers – which is what motivated the state to reach out to 42 and get a campus set up here – is so great that they’re almost trying to reserve students in advance, and he’s having to, in a way, protect the current crop from employers, as he urges them to stay a few months longer and finish the Common Core. Of course, job prospects and other measures of success are going to vary from one campus to another, but 42 touts these figures from a 2022 survey for its Paris campus: 100% employment rate for those who’ve finished the Common Core, 12% started their own businesses, €47 000 average annual salary. Maybe some scepticism about those figures (and particularly how useful they are as a guide to expectations for other campuses) is in order, but it does seem likely that, for many people, there’s a pretty good return to be had here on a free education.
Linckels also says that around a third of students at 42 Luxembourg have university degrees (though not necessarily in anything IT-related), around a third have only secondary school diplomas and around a third didn’t finish secondary school – although these estimates, he admits, are based just on casual chats he’s had with students, as 42 does not formally ask for such information. Requiring neither payment nor prior qualifications, nor even prior knowledge of any kind, 42 has, it seems clear, both impressive potential as a channel for social mobility and an expanded pool of talent to draw on – much of it thoroughly untapped.
Given these features, 42 posed an intriguing question for me: what if I was to give it a go? I’m an Arts & Humanities guy, with no background in IT, let alone coding – and yet I’ve long thought that it couldn’t hurt to get to grips with this all-pervasive language of the modern world. Also, plenty of Arts & Humanities friends of mine have been losing work – in translation, in copyrighting, in graphic design – to automation, and I’m pretty sure my proofreading side-hustle has been shrinking for the same reason. Meanwhile coders, at least for now, are in greater demand than ever. What, I wondered, would a journey from a humanist to a born-again coder, or at least its first steps, be like? And, while we’re at it, how would having no teachers and classes work in practice?
A total of 136 of us turned up for the first day of the Piscine last month. Upon arrival, we took it in turns to go through a quick registration process, enjoying complimentary refreshments and chatting to each other while waiting for everyone to be done. Then we had an introductory pep talk from Linckels and a few other staff members, and off we went. We were sat at computers, trying to work out where/how we could even find the exercises we were supposed to do. I must have spent at least an hour on that, not helped by the unfamiliarity of the operating system and the keyboard I was working with. And then there was the first actual exercise… And it wasn’t just that I didn’t understand the exercise – I didn’t understand quite a few of the words in front of me, and, when I looked up those words, I didn’t understand quite a few of the words used in defining them either. I don’t know how many levels of this I went through without reaching the solid foundation of a definition I could largely understand. I searched, in the meantime, for articles and videos on the very basics of coding, and yet they too quickly lost me and didn’t get close to equipping me to do that first exercise. This experience of not being able to get a foothold in understanding, despite trying hard… Even one hour of this is psychologically tough. But five hours? Eight? Two days? Epistemic hell, it occurred to me to call it – the first of three kinds of hell I soon found myself in.
The second kind of hell I felt myself plunged into in the early days of the Piscine was social. As I saw it, it’s one thing asking for help; it’s another thing asking for help with everything. It’s one thing saying ‘hey man, I’m not sure I’m taking the right approach to this exercise – how did you go about it’? It’s another asking ‘what does any of this even mean?!’ Furthermore, I had nothing to offer in return, and saw no prospect of that changing. Longing for a good old-fashioned teacher, I buckled down to a constant dialogue with ChatGPT, which initially cheered me with its confidence, patience and friendliness, but then of course just went and got many things completely, infuriatingly wrong.
The third of my hells was a time management hell. I said that the Piscine is an intensive one-month course, but that sounds innocuous compared to the reality. For that month, it needs to be your full-time occupation, the organisers make clear – and ideally you check in not just five days a week, but seven, as some important parts of the Piscine only happen at weekends. Another of 42’s quirks is that its students can come and go anytime they want, 24/7; you’re not allowed to sleep onsite, but you can stay there working all night, if you like. Some people indeed seemed never to leave. I however had hours of commuting to do, and shopping and cooking and laundry and so on, and family responsibilities, and little freelance jobs I couldn’t afford not to take. Within days of starting the Piscine, I was going short on sleep, eating badly, not exercising, feeling constantly stressed and like there was no slack at all in my days. And I was still falling further behind with the course!
I’d originally imagined doing the whole Piscine, but I soon realised that, in my circumstances, that was just not possible; I’d have to be satisfied with getting a sense of it, and then possibly return in the future. I stayed for just over a week, and that was long enough for me to at least learn how you get out of the ‘drowning phase’, as I heard several staff members describe it.
42 Luxembourg, in common with some other 42 campuses, has in-house coaches that students can consult for guidance on anything bar the exercises themselves. On the morning of the second day, I tried to book a session – by then, they were all taken until the morning of the fourth day.
What I learnt from my coaching session was that the sheer difficulty at the start of the course is intended to push students to seek help from their peers, and the 42 system has back-up ways of nudging stubborn people like me to get into the peer-to-peer-learning swing of things. You cannot progress beyond the very start of the course (where I still was at that point) without submitting your work for evaluation by your fellow students, and, in addition, you cannot submit your work for evaluation by your fellow students many times without making yourself available to evaluate their work. The evaluation always takes the form of a face-to-face discussion, with one student not only seeing whether the other’s code works or not but also checking that the other really understands that code. And then there are the group projects, known as rushes. In the rushes, teams, whose membership is randomly determined, are evaluated based on their weakest member’s understanding – so teams try hard to teach their weakest members, and the weakest members feel an obligation to try hard for their teams. Finally, all students also have periods when they cannot progress with the course, as they must wait for evaluation, and those periods they might as well spend helping people sat next to them.
Between days 4 and 7, all three of these dynamics caused me to have extended conversations with fellow students, and, however much data ChatGPT may have crunched, and whatever fine qualifications the authors of the articles and videos I’d been going through may have to their names, these fellow students were able to get me to understand far more, far more quickly. They were, in their friendly way, dismissive of the concerns that had kept me from reaching out for help myself, telling me that, in fact, more advanced coding students can become blind to things that newcomers still see and there are also, for instance, emotional forms of help you don’t need to be a great coder to provide, and that, anyway, this is what 42 is all about and that they enjoyed helping their fellow students, whether or not such favours were likely to be returned.
One of the other students I met – a tax advisor by profession – was doing the Piscine just as a fun challenge. A few also were there to add to their skillsets and so give themselves boosts along career paths they were already on; in this category, there was, for instance, a secondary school ICT teacher, and a student of Computer Science in his final year at a nearby Belgian university. The majority of those I spoke to though were either doing precarious/menial jobs or they were unemployed, with many of the latter having had 42 recommended to them by ADEM. I met, for instance, a chef whose restaurant had burned down, a roofer who’d been laid off, and a man who earned his living buying and selling stock but had not got rich out of it and was now tired of the riskiness and instability. A couple of those I met had dropped out of school in their teens, messed around for a bit and were now trying to get back on the educational ladder. Quite a lot had come to Luxembourg with family but couldn’t speak the local languages or didn’t have qualifications that satisfied employers here and so they’d not been able to get jobs, or certainly not ones representative of their talents. I heard Turkish, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese being spoken around the 42 premises, as well as plenty of Luxembourgish, French and English – which was also the main administrative language, and almost the only language used in the WhatsApp and Slack groups.
Generally the other Pisciners I met seemed to me very bright and motivated. Most had little or no background in IT, though several mentioned to me that the moment they’d known that they would be taking part, they’d started reading up and watching tutorials on coding, as well as practising with online compilers and AI tools. One of the first things I learnt from those who helped me was that there are much better ways of using chatbots than, as I’d been doing, copying and pasting whole exercises and asking for carefully explained instructions on how to complete them. Indeed, by the time I left, I had the impression that there was, at least in our Piscine cohort, a standard approach to any given exercise, which consisted of, first, finding the code for the finished exercise on GitHub (where someone will always have uploaded it), and then asking ChatGPT to explain how its various components work. Certainly not everyone I spoke to was doing this, but I think most were, so that I wondered whether the ‘learning to learn’ dimension of the course mightn’t be undermined. In one group conversation I was involved in, a young woman said, to the general agreement of those present, that she found it incredible that many people had done the course, and somehow got through it, before ChatGPT even existed.
Unsurprisingly, a recurring conversation among students concerned whether coding too will be a redundant skill before long, given how good AI already is at it and the rate of its improvement. When I asked Serge Linckels this question, he told me that he’s convinced human beings will always have an important kind of edge over AI in coding, but that it’s crucial coders today learn to work well with AI, as it is an extraordinary tool that greatly enhances what they can do. I also liked what one fellow student – whose hobby, incidentally, was creating complex and never-before-seen virtual shapes on Shadertoy – had to say on this, namely that those who learn to code now will quite possibly be in a strange position of power one day, if, as seems likely, AI continues to get rapidly better at coding, and so subsequent generations don’t really learn to code properly, despite coding being no less fundamental to the world around them, more so in fact. Of course being one of the shrinking minority who understand the language of the machine would not, in this imagined future, necessarily entail having a job.
In my last few days, I also started to get a sense of the magic of programming. It is God-like, in a way. It’s a kind of rudimentary world-building. (There is, it occurs to me, a certain jokey boastfulness in that choice of name – 42 – the meaning of life.) There’s a thrill for me when I see what just a few lines of code can make happen. It’s also astonishing to think that all the different elements of the programming language we’re working with – C, chosen because it’s archetypal, elemental, difficult, unforgiving of even minor inaccuracies – really just represent different combinations of 1s and 0s, and it is through different combinations of 1s and 0s that everything we see on computer screens is called into being. I of course didn’t get enough experience at 42 to know whether I could contentedly work in coding, but, if I couldn’t, it’s not because of any inherent lack of wonder in the profession.
I regret that I couldn’t finish the Piscine. I know some other students I met struggled, because of other commitments they had, to stay with it until the end, and there were few I spoke to who didn’t say the course put them under considerable strain. For these reasons, maybe the biggest question my 42 experience left me with was, Why four weeks full-time for the Piscine? Why so very intensive? Especially as that seems in conflict with 42’s ethos of inclusivity: ‘We make digital an opportunity for all, everywhere’, crows 42 central’s homepage, but how many of us can spare a month full-time with no promise of even being admitted to the main course at the end of that? 42 misses out on a lot of talent because of this, surely, and I would bet it causes plenty of little crises in the overstretched lives of its students. Linckels accepts the basic point here, and says he’s suggested to 42 central that they could do a shorter Piscine – maybe two weeks long. He says it’s possible the length/intensity of the Piscine will be altered in the years ahead.
Then again, one member of staff suggested to me that, in its current format, the Piscine is perhaps a real acid test of whether you can truly love coding, and/or whether you’re serious about this new direction in your life. Interestingly, when I met up with some of the students after they’d finished the Piscine, they were less critical of the length/intensity. They were extremely proud of what they’d achieved in getting through it, and several spoke of it as among the most special experiences of their lives. Would they have felt the same if it had been a part-time course, a two-week course? In the days leading up to the announcement of the results of the Piscine, the WhatsApp group was full of anxious messages, people desperately hoping they’d made it, wishing each other the best of luck. Again, would they have been so invested, and would they have formed such strong bonds with each other, if the Piscine hadn’t been quite the beast it was?
It also strikes me that 42’s Piscine offers conditions that many people are longing for in today’s world. To start off with, it provides a close-knit, day-to-day community. Plus then it provides a clear objective, a clear direction, and obstacles to overcome – and as you have these in common with your peers, there’s both an individual and collective dimension to your efforts. You can be a hero, you can be the object of someone else’s heroism. You can compete, you can collaborate. And the whole community is animated with this journey you’re on together, its twists and turns, its highs and lows. The weekly exams, I didn’t even mention, are 4 hours long, the final one is 8 hours (!). There is gallows humour as you wait in the corridor. And it is, in the end, a compelling mission everyone has: mastering this fundamental tool that shapes the modern world. And the prize, almost in view, is well-paying, respectable jobs. I can totally see why people – especially economically and socially marginalised people, who make up a fair proportion of 42’s student body – find it so captivating. At times you can feel this stuff in the atmosphere of the room. I think of something Linckels told us in his introductory pep talk on the first day – something which at the time and for a while afterwards seemed pretty improbable: ‘You will miss the Piscine. You will miss us when it’s over.’