Teaching somebody how to set up a rails app with some basic routes and implementing some ajax calls and stuff, sure.

Will they know what's going on under the hood though?

Taking somebody from ground zero and teaching them enough to be able to debug problems that the hires would need to know in order to be proficient, self starting engineers.. I'm really skeptical about that being done in 8 weeks.

Most of the little tricks and crap I've learned over the years have been through trial and error, and working on many different projects.

More specific examples: for loops not creating scope in javascript and asynchronous calls introducing race conditions due to not understanding them. Those aren't things that are in curriculums, though when trying to build some features most people will encounter them.