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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like a crazy plan for a startup, I realize, but this is the right sort of crazy. In fact, the way the Hackruiters think about Hacker School is a lot like the way we initially thought about YC: if it doesn't make money, it will at least have been a benevolent thing to do.

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Indeed.

    We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us
    is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. 
    
    —Niels Bohr

Sometimes the same goes for startups.

Regarding startups, I would usually include the third line of the quote.

    My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

I think its an awesome idea, really. I had an almost identical idea after wading through interviewing potential candidates where I work. 90% of people recruiters send to you are barely screened, unprepared and underqualified. It seemed to me that if a recruiter would just sit people down for a few weeks and teach some relavent job skills, they'd have a much higher success rate.

Thanks. This is a big part of it. We'd love it if the end result was that we had put a few more good hackers out into the market.

I don't think you'll have a big problem meeting that goal. I just hope you guys can move to other markets (I assume you're only in SF right now?). There's a severe shortage of Rails devs in other places, because the best ones tend to migrate.

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