Hackruiter (YC S10) Launches Hacker School

I originally met Dave and Nick through the outgoing hacker community in NYC. I say outgoing because the community here self-selects into people looking to bond over programming. Sure enough, Dave, Nick and Sonali were part of it. I met Sonali during Hacker School.

I was somewhat aware of Hackruiter and felt they were really smart. They always asked lots of questions and helped me reinforce my understanding of things.

Dave and I went out for dinner and he told me the idea was to have a bunch of smart people in a room and see what happens when they all also like coding. I had been working on a few frameworks one the side, Brubeck and DictShield, and thought it'd be great to work with a bunch of other people.

We all introduced ourselves at Hacker School's first day and talked about what we intended to work on. All of us had that slight impatience like when we want to get working. We also all had that same curiosity where you want to know what you can learn and share with other people.

Everyone had really awesome ideas. Everyone completed lots of awesome ideas. We talked about programming, heard talks from awesome guests, discussed concurrency, functional programming, distributed systems, python, ruby, erlang, c, javascript, node.js, brubeck, zeromq, nginx... the list just keeps going on because the group knew when to talk and share ideas and when to just put the headphones on and hack.

I wrote a lot of code for Brubeck and DictShield. I also built a link sharing example site called ListSurf. Then I built it in a more elaborate way and called that Readify. I got a lot of stuff done.

I reached out to my friends to find those that had that same values and creative drive as the first group and I'm happy to say a bunch of them went and really enjoyed it.

The second batch, batch[1], was just as awesome. Two of my friends from the Dumbo Tech Breakfast were there. A friend from NYCPython was there. New friends came from law school, ran a beef jerky shop, have built music sites, have taught programming classes and managed libraries.

I have met some of my favorite people through Hacker School. That's an amazing gift to receive for free. I spent every Saturday with Hacker School during batch[1], even though I was in batch[0].

Never graduate.

I'm one of those rare programming animals with a foot in each world.

I have written over a million lines of code and implemented many fairly sophisticated applications in over 90 different companies. So I have a great deal of confidence in my ability to build stuff. But here's the rub: most of the technologies I know so well are old (some may even say obsolete). So I have done what any self-respecting programmer would have done: I have taken upon myself to learn new technologies on my own and implement what I can where I can.

But there is so much demand for my services in the "old" technologies, it's hard to throw the switch. After spending all day on a client's project, it's tough to get enough momentum on my own stuff.

Also, I feel like I can really hold my own in areas in which I'm proficient. But technologies change so quickly, there are so many important things I feel weak in. Too weak to use on a client's work yet important enough to use when building new stuff. Also, I have never had any formal computer science education; I've learned everything I know in the school of hard knocks.

The idea of spending 3 months full time in the company of like-minded souls building cool stuff with new technologies and learning together is practically orgasmic for someone like me. (I know, I'm pathetic.) This would be the opportunity to "catch up" in all the things I've been wanting to do in an intense 3 month period. I can already think of a dozen projects I'd like to try in the class.

A few questions:

- How hard would it be to maintain a 30 to 40 hour client workload while going through the program? (And still have the energy to get all I want out of it.) I already work remotely and pretty much set my own hours. I do not want to stop my current work because people depend on me and I like the steady income.

- Do I sound like the kind of person who would do well in your program or are you seeking a more junior demographic?

- How hard would it be to get a reasonable room in NYC while maintaining a home elsewhere? (February 13 is way too soon for someone like me to relocate.)

- When will the next (after the Feb 13) session be? (That may be the best answer to my first 2 questions.)

It sounds like you guys are doing a great thing. Off the top of my head, I can think of dozens of my contempories that would blossom in a program like this. Best wishes for great success!

When I got out of college ~13 years ago, I went to work for a large retail corp. Their stuff was all mainframe and COBOL. They had a hard time finding new hires obviously so they had their own internal training program. The interview process was intense, around 4 hours of face to face interviews followed by a 3 hour written test (language independent, all logic and flow charting). If you got accepted, you were brought on and paid a salary for 3 months to go through their mainframe training program. The total cost for them was around 15k per student, which is far less than what I see the big tech companies offering as a signing bonus.

I'm a batch[1] alumnus and law-school student who, prior to Hacker School, had been programming for only about a month. I did Hacker School concurrently with law school, but my attention split between the two was about 99:1. Before I started HS, I knew only the very basics -- the stuff you might find in the first 3-4 chapters of your standard introductory Python book. Once I started Hacker School, my knowledge absorption rate shot up at least five fold. This is because it is hard to overestimate the value of:

(1) working next to people like Dave/Nick (HS co-founders), who will not just answer your programming question -- but spend the next 3 hours of their time happily explaining to you the intricacies of 15 other topics related to your question, all the while infecting you with their enthusiasm for those topics;

(2) having the structure that Hacker school provides -- the morning check-ins, the spontaneous white-board-assisted discussions, the Saturday presentations -- to help you tackle those projects you've always wanted to start/complete;

(3) simply being in the physical proximity of people who love programming, people who will show you how much you still have left to learn, and make you excited about learning it.

I'm now leaving law school to work at a software development company in San Francisco, which is a development that I certainly did not think was possible after just 3.5 months of serious coding. So yeah, HS can make you employable too, and probably much faster than you expect. But as Nick/Dave say (http://www.hackerschool.com/about) getting a job certainly shouldn't be your only reason for joining.

Would love to hear anecdotes about past batches, how far they progressed, and maybe even know a little more about how placements have worked out from the perspective of participants and hiring companies.

Regarding hiring companies - are they looking at the output of participants or using the Hacker School team as highly trusted referral agents? I know it has to be both, but am curious how much the project portfolio at the end is impressing companies.

I guess one way of answering that question might be knowing a little about how participants did with their project portfolios in finding new gigs that you guys did not act as referral agents for . . . ?

Regardless, this is a very cool take on the "building better hackers" stories going on and I hope you guys are wildly successful.

I love how rapidly the forms of organization are changing around software and startups. This is almost like a guild.

I'd love to see a bit of clarification about that part in the FAQ.

As a ten year developer I'd love to be able to participate in this sort of collective though. Maybe coworking + meetups makes a better fit for someone in my shoes.

"Hacker School is currently only for people who already know how to code."

How well must an applicant know how to code?

Except that instead of being a recruitment mechanism for the host company, it is an environment to give people skills and match them up with external companies, and in return get a referral fee.

Really a good idea; I wonder if it is scalable. They will have to figure out a way to assess coding ability objectively?

I first met the Hackruiters in June when I got in touch looking for a job. I had moved to NYC two years before to work at a non-profit and was ready for a new challenge. My best friend and I had spent the better part of a year moonlighting on side projects we dreamed might become startups, and--even though they went nowhere--I had realized I wanted to get back into programming.

Dave set up a Skype date and I told him about my background: I'd been a math/science kid who spent his teens coding, but ended up studying art history and architecture (because of varied interests) in school. I had done some technical internships, though, and was curious if I could rebrand myself. What kind of work could I do to make myself a better coder and ultimately become a developer? Dave had some initial suggestions and we agreed to talk again after a while.

I'll never forget sitting in the most boring staff meeting of my life and opening up Gmail to find a short (but warm!) e-mail from Dave asking if I'd like to join a school for hackers. There were to be no teachers, no assignments, and the dates and location were still totally in flux. It sounded perfect. Within the week, I arranged to take a leave of absence from my job. New York is not cheap, but I'd spent two years packing my lunch and avoiding taxis in the hopes that I would be ready when a cool, slightly risky opportunity came along.

I've spent a lot of time talking about my own background for two reasons. First, I hope you can empathize with me and--in doing so--will consider applying. I think there are many people with non-CS backgrounds who would benefit from and be a benefit to Hacker School. The other reason, however, is that Hacker School is exactly what you expect: if you can imagine a month (or three) working on projects that interest you with some of the brightest folks in the most exciting city in the U.S., then you've pictured it precisely.

Many alums will talk about the employment benefits of Hacker School; indeed, I honed my coding skills and talked to 6 NYC-based startups, eventually short-circuiting interviews after falling in love with one where I now work. For me, however, Hacker School was about finding a home with the kindest, most egoless group of smart folks I've met--a group that Dave, Sonali, and Nick are especially skilled at assembling. If this sounds like your thing, you should give it a shot--and I'll buy you a beer/coffee some Saturday when we (students and alums alike) head out in the evening to talk code and socialize.

Startups/hackers that help startups/hackers that help startups/hackers.

Or is it that some startups can't attract CS grads? Or is the CS education just bad/ not wanted by the startups?

If you are thinking of joining, you might be interested in a blog post I wrote about my journey to Hacker School and what it meant to me: http://sethmurphy.com/my_programming_reboot

Edit: I now realize that there might not be any.

Is there any way Hackruiter would expand to maybe a city like Boston?

This Hacker School is essentially a training ground for startup programmers, focusing on everything from writing code to scheduling and managing expectations. This is a great idea, but it does not create a true "hacker".

A hacker de-assembles, re-assembles, engineers, and reverse engineers systems, on their own time, at their own pace, and is not motivated by profits and deliverables as much as the mere process.

But, I suppose if enough people re-define the word, then it must be.