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On an August morning in Paris, when most of the city is in an advanced state of summer torpor, hundreds of young men and women are sweating it out in the third week of a gruelling month-long endurance test.
While the trial is called the "piscine" (swimming pool) and towels dot the ultra-modern building, the contest is not about physical prowess.
Welcome instead to the tryouts for Ecole 42, a free computer coding college founded by French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel in 2013 to help young people find work in IT or, better still, become their own bosses.
Named after the offbeat answer to "the ultimate question of life" in Douglas Adam's comic classic "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy," the ultra-modern college, with neither teachers nor conventional tuition, quickly gained cult status.
Around 40,000 people apply each year for one of roughly 1,000 spots on the programme.
Around 3,000 make it to the daunting "piscine" stage, in which the candidates spend 10 to 16 hours a day over four weeks completing projects and doing exams.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @05:00PM
Same reason why armies want young men in their ranks - easy to brainwash with "for the glory of XYZ".
Young people are easily impressed with "you work hard, you can have it all too!" and since statistics is a real thing, most just work hard for someone else until they burn out and someone new comes along, eager, onto the hamster wheel. "Faster hamster, faster! If you run fast enough, you get to the Promise Land!"