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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: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday August 21 2019, @05:46AM
Aah, you mean when it's gone from being voluntary to being required lest they lose their job? Yesss, that is such a sweet change...