Hacker School is a great thing to do during a sabbatical or career break. I got pretty burned out on my previous job (of 6 years) in the Midwest. I was also a bit lonely since there wasn't much of a tech community in the area. I came out to New York for the Winter 2013 batch, and it was exactly the kick in the pants I needed. By the end of the batch, I had renewed vigor, job prospects, and a bunch of new friends. I ended up moving permanently to NYC for a new job (which Hacker School facilitated).
The Hacker School experience and community are fantastic. I'd highly recommend it to any other software engineers having a quarter-life crisis ;-)
Hacker School has a really broad range of programming experience and knowledge. It's definitely not just for beginning programmers, although there are many who have been programming for a year or less. The common denominator is enthusiasm for programming and becoming better programmers. The idea behind the residents program [1] was to make sure that no matter your level as a Hacker Schooler, there would always be someone you can go to and bounce hard problems off of.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I've applied to Hacker School twice and found them to be short, impersonal and sometimes even rude to me during the interview process. They asked questions that struck me as inviting me to participate in "dickwaving" rather than talking about the nuance of my work or the problems I've engaged with. Such as "what's the hardest thing you have ever done?"
I've never seriously thought about the work I've done on any continuum of what's hard and what's not, I think about my code in terms of the other people that have to work with it, and whether it addresses the problem. And for me personally, what I have learned from individual projects. Sure some things are more challenging than others, but what do you really learn from the answer to that question? It's also an intimidating starting point coming from someone putting themselves in a position of authority to decide whether you are "good enough" for their program. And surprising from a group of hackers who in their pitch to potential applicants emphasize that your experience isn't as important as your love of programming and attitude about learning. I'm usually eager to try out new things and look forward to new stuff to learn rather than dwelling on what my "conquests" are. It struck me as the engineer bro equivalent of "what's the hottest girl you've ever hooked up with?" Maybe the point isn't to do "the hardest thing" but to learn and to do cool stuff that serves the people who interact with your software?
Also one of their interviewers called my code "shaky" after pairing, which could be true, but it's not very constructive or specific is it? It could be that I got extremely unlucky because the things they write on their blog are very uplifitng and intelligent. And one of my friends did Hacker School and generally had positive things to say. But I really felt like I was treated terribly as an applicant, and the facilitators came off as having a high regard for themselves and engineering arrogance rather than being interested in helping people and being constructive.
I'm sorry to hear you had a negative experience applying :( A few thoughts:
1) Our interviews are definitely short, which is a consequence of our wanting to give as many people an interview as possible. Even with our interviews as short as they are, we typically spend 200+ hours doing interviews each batch. So while we'd love to do longer interviews, it'd mean interviewing many fewer people, which we don't think is a good tradeoff (either for us or for applicants in general).
2) Again, because of time constraints, we can't give everyone detailed, specific feedback. However, if you email me (nick [at] hackerschool.com) the email address you applied with, I will do my best to get you specific feedback on your code.
3) I'm the first to admit that our admissions process is far from perfect. It's undoubtedly one of the hardest, most psychologically draining parts of running Hacker School. Even if we assume we get it "right" 95% of the time (which is probably way too generous to us), it still means we're going to make dozens of mistakes each batch :(
4) We occasionally will ask people questions along the lines of "what's the hardest thing you've worked on?" We've found this usually leads to a discussion of interesting challenges and problems people have faced, how they've approached them, etc. It's in no meant to be "dickwaving" or in any way arrogant.
I hope whatever other path you've ended up on to continue growing as a programmer has been fruitful and enjoyable!
"But I really felt like I was treated terribly as an applicant, and the facilitators came off as having a high regard for themselves and engineering arrogance rather than being interested in helping people and being constructive."
I attended Hacker School Winter 2013. No community is perfect, of course, and it sucks that you felt you were treated that way. But my experience in and out of hacker school is that it is about the least arrogant community of hackers ever. It explicitly discourages the sort of "dickwaving" you're complaining about, and the group does a good job of pushing aside arrogance by being nice, encouraging, and enthusiastic. All those good behaviors just come out more naturally when you're surrounded by other people exhibiting them, and in my experience the facilitators totally lead the way on that.
Which is not to say you didn't have a crappy experience, because everyone has bad days. And it's not to say there's zero arrogance at hacker school because, well... programmers. But in general, I think it is a super helpful and constructive place.
What you refer to as "dickwaving" is them attempting to understand your eye for detail. Great hackers often have fantastic eyes for detail. You might have one, but you missed your chance to demonstrate it by interpreting this so negatively.
Please read the Hacker School Manual for a look at how seriously they take treating people with decency and respect: https://www.hackerschool.com/manual
That's exactly my point. I've read the hacker school manual. I'm suggesting that they are not very good at practicing what they preach, at least in my experience applying to hacker school.
There is a good chance they meant what project stretched your abilities the most. Or which project did you have to grow the most to complete.
Learning and stretching ones self varies in difficulty from person to person. For many people it is considered hard to extremely hard so ability stretching/growing project is synonymous with a hard project.
> Also one of their interviewers called my code "shaky" after pairing, which could be true, but it's not very constructive or specific is it?
No that is not very specific, which is unfortunate. A founder's comment in this thread mentioned that they think their time is best spent reviewing more application rather then going in depth with fewer. So not giving in depth, specific responses is complementary to their strategy of interviewing more people.
They might be better off giving less or no feedback rather then anything off the cuff. Hard to balance that against an applicants frustration at getting no feedback however.
Hacker School has created a really productive space for people (of a variety of skill levels) interested in programming, and I think two things have made that the case:
#1 is definitely that interesting people apply (which is why you need to!)
#2 is that it's in really good hands: in all my interactions with the founders and residents, I've consistently been impressed -- they're smart, they're thoughtful, and they're passionate about the mission.
(Our startup has hired two Hacker Schoolers so far.)
I'm not against affirmative action on principle, but does anyone else find it a little strange that the need-based grants are only available to female programmers? They could bias the admission process in favor of female applicants (or other underrepresented demographics) without conflating financial issues, right? Or there aren't even enough female applicants without this incentive to allow for that?
We take this approach specifically because we don't do any affirmative action or bias our admissions process in favor of specific groups. These grants are our hack for how to have a more gender-balanced environment without negatively impacting men or lowering the bar for women. The grants work because they increase the pool of qualified women who are able to do Hacker School.
> "We take this approach specifically because we don't do any affirmative action or bias our admissions process in favor of specific groups."
You're giving grants to women specifically because they are women. That's a bias. You're favoring a specific group. What about the men who haven't applied because they can't afford it and aren't women? You should be giving grants to underprivileged people regardless of sex. But that wouldn't get you or the companies sponsoring the grants nice press release, now would it?
1) We judge male and female applicants on exactly the same scale. We in no way lower the bar for women or any other group. Nor do we give women or any other group a leg up when making admissions decisions.
2) We offer grants to women who need financial assistance. By offering these grants, we do bias the pool of applicants, because we (hopefully) increase the number of women who choose to apply.
3) We have put a tremendous amount of time, energy, thought, and effort over the past few years into making Hacker School free for everyone, and we continue to work very hard to continue making this possible. We effectively give all our students a $10-15k scholarship by not charging any tuition.
Our great crime appears to be the fact that we have not yet found a way to additionally give money to everyone who can't afford to come to Hacker School.
I really like this approach to the gender imbalance problem: grow the pool, don't lower the bar. I think this is the way to go, and I hope that more tech organizations will think of it this way.
I don't have a problem with it - in the past, at least some (if not all) are coming directly from Etsy (http://www.etsy.com/hacker-grants). They want to attract more women into their business because they see benefits of women being well represented in their workplace.
> They could bias the admission process in favor of female applicants (or other underrepresented demographics) without conflating financial issues, right?
They could, but would that honestly be better? Would you want them to lower standards for women or reject highly qualified (male) applicants just to make room for more female applicants in the accepted pool?
It's not an ideal solution, but considering the school is tuition-free for everybody, regardless of gender, I don't think this approach is all that bad.
I have a question:
is it just impossible to get any kind of monetary help (scholarship) for the living expenses? as someone who does not live in the U.S. My application would depend on this, and I would not like to give them more applications to read if there's no chance of that.
P.S I read the FAQ and I am not a women, that's why I'm asking.
Edit: "Our great crime appears to be the fact that we have not yet found a way to additionally give money to everyone who can't afford to come to Hacker School."
So I guess that's a no, in case someone else is wondering, that was answered by nicholasjbs.
For those who've attended this school or are otherwise just familiar enough to answer this question, what's the expected total cost of living over the course of the program? Is it common for students to find shared living arrangements to cut down on NYC rents?
Most Hacker Schoolers find shared living arrangements (i.e., they usually sublet a room in an apartment).
The total cost depends on your circumstances (e.g., if you have student loans, dependents, etc), but if you're only supporting yourself and are willing to live cheaply, you can do it on $5 to 6k (this number is based on an informal poll of our students I did a few batches ago; it's also what I personally live off of during a batch).
I've love to get an idea of this too. Hacker School seems pretty appealing but I'm not sure if I would be able to afford huge costs (I've read in some blog posts that the cost of living is pretty high, especially short term).
If I am a programmer who just finished a bootcamp and has some decent side projects (a book on clojure web dev, a new take on spreeder, and some other ones in the works) that are all open source, is hacker school far above my skill level for working with you guys? I've perused the website far too many times in the last several months but have held off from applying because I wasn't sure if i had the chops to work with you guys and it would be a dream of mine to take such a good chunk of time and dedicate it to open source work with other like minded hackers who seem to be a brilliant bunch.
> I've perused the website far too many times in the last several months but have held off from applying because I wasn't sure if i had the chops to work with you guys
Sports analogy: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take"
People who get into HS fall all along the experience spectrum. Some have only been programming a few months, and some have been programming professionally for decades. Most are somewhere in between.
You might as well apply. If you get turned down, it's not the end of the world and you can try again for the next batch. I know of people who were turned down twice and got in on their third try.
I didn't know they had that attitude with repeat applicants. That is really great, actually. I'm currently barely in a financial boat to support it due to some exigent circumstances, but I will definitely be applying next batch in that case :) Thanks for the words of encouragement! I just encounter so many ridiculously intelligent folk in this realm it gets imposing to think about working with many of them or even considering myself on the same level. Maybe my confidence is more important than I thought and should worry about it alongside my code and not put it aside completely.
You'll be fine. If you like programming and it sounds like Hacker School would be fun, you should apply. The minimum experience you need to have a good time and learn a lot is very low, and if you're writing a book on Clojure web dev then I'd bet you're way past it.
Disclaimer: the book is written under the pretense of "by a beginner, for a beginner", so it isn't exactly the best material ever, but I feel I'm getting good coverage on the main topics. I'm currently pushing hard for people to peer review the initial chapters before I continue into the next bulk of it so I can make sure the style its being done in is conducive to learning the material effectively. I don't want to plug it here because I'll seem like a shill, but if you are interested I can share the link privately.
Serious question: Can someone recommend a program or type of program to code for my example that would show I'm capable? I'm a self-taught beginner but I want to tackle something that would be more intermediate to demonstrate I have gumption.
Right now I'm coding an entire redo of my state's legislative site because I find it lacking in too many ways but there's not really any JS in there that I would say is impressive (plus that's how bad their site is).
Hmm, how about if you build some kind of API to the legislative site's data somehow? Bills coming up, etc.? Or whatever data is there. Then a widget could display the data on other sites. Just a (very conventional) thought.
I don't think it has to be in-depth. I just made an implementation of Blackjack in Python. The rules are very easy to code up, and the AI (the dealer) is actually hard-coded by the rules, so no nasty trees or recursion.
It also allowed me to demonstrate my knowledge of object oriented programming, program design, etc.
I would probably recommend something other than a mostly HMTL/CSS website because that doesn't show off your programming chops very well.
Are there any other initiatives like this elsewhere in the world? As much as I'd like to commute over from the UK, I think the petrol costs might make it unfeasible.
The Hacker School experience and community are fantastic. I'd highly recommend it to any other software engineers having a quarter-life crisis ;-)