The Hacker School Experience

The filter is very high. They get thousands of applicants for each cycle, so there has to be some convincing proof that you have what it takes. The implicit question from these schools is very simple: If you did NOT go to their school, would you have gained the requisite knowledge anyways through your own learning?

The reason they have to ask this question is multi-fold:

1- They are asking you to invest tons of time in very little time to learn and pick up all the skills they ask you to pick up.

2- They won't look good unless their students do good at the class

3- They won't look good if their students don't get jobs.

And since this is a two-way street, what have you done to convince them that you will deliver on your promise to make them look good?

Examples:

1- Did you take, and become certified on any of those MOOC courses?

2- Have you created anything of significance like a website? I'm not talking about plugging up a WordPress Site without even customizing the CSS, but something where you had to understand the technology you were using, like hand-coding PHP and MySQL. Do you have anything in github?

3- What programming languages do you use? Have you attempted to learn anything more special, like Scala or Lisp, or are you still mucking around with whatever you began learning with?

I know the above sounds excessive, but it really isn't if you consider the goals involved, which means you are to get a good-paying job, and you were pretty much on your way anyways. Yes, it will probably take a tad more convincing if you are older, have no experience, and don't have any recent tough filters to prove your abilities to them. If these schools are to be taken seriously by future employers, they have to prove that they were tough to get into, because otherwise, saying you educate people to become junior-level programmers in 3 months would actually be a joke, not sound like one. The bar is set very high for these schools or they will go out of business, so set the bar very high for yourself first, then apply. Don't blame them for your age or your gender, because it is not likely that is what is happening here.

1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.

2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. (Though as we point out, we don't think being obsessive is necessary.)

Also, in ESR's "How to be a hacker"[2] he includes both learning to write and communicate well and sharing what you learn and build with others as requirements for being a hacker.

[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

[2] http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4

EDIT: To anyone reading the parent comment without clicking through to the blog post it's excerpting, please note the parent comment ignores the first two criteria we list:

Someone who is intellectually curious. Hackers enjoy tinkering and understanding how things work. They revel in going deeper into things, and love asking questions: How can I make my code easier to debug? What is making my program slow? How does this work?

Someone who enjoys programming. We spend most of our time at Hacker School programming, there aren't grades or tests to make you study, and you don't get a degree or certificate for doing Hacker School, so it's important that you like coding.

I don't believe Nick or any Hacker School facilitator look to revolutionize "hacker." I don't believe they want to get into any semantic argument.

If anything, they're sharing their school of thought on hacking. On the one hand, they indeed have their opinions about programming and what it means to be a "hacker." On the other, they are also openminded to hearing different opinions and expanding their own.

In my observation, they don't intend to redefine anything. They just want to expand an ongoing conversation with others who care about programming.

That's an awful definition of a hacker. Hacking, regardless of definition, was always a subculture. It was never about just being skillful, that's more inline with the modern washed out definition.

DISCLAIMER: I am on the Hacker School bandwagon as a participant myself ;)

Some State Universities can explicitly accept and reject candidates on the basis of gender.

Some State Universities can let students pick their own projects and grade on effort.

But others have admissions criteria determined by law, and others must have final exams that are the same for each student.

In other words, how can Hacker School adapt higher-ed pedagogy to better accomodate women engineers?

What do you think a family of 3 would need to pay for rent during Hacker School? (Assume the goal is to live as cheaply as possible, but to be in a safe area).

The pictures all show a bunch of well, young and attractive people. Regardless, coming out of the downturn, there are many experienced engineers struggling to shift from a diminishing part of the industry into web development.

Do you support such training/retraining and what would be the best thing such a candidate could do to get in?

Honestly, if someone going to school meets a more established opportunity to work at a real startup or with a real company with a production product, then I think that's a good distraction anyway, since they'll move on to the real deal, instead of just working on educational open source projects, and really start their career.

>> "hackers were programmers/technicians who could modify programs or machines to perform tasks beyond their original intended use (for good or bad)"

That is incredibly vague. In fact, by that standard, I was a "hacker" in 8th grade.

Is there some unspoken and arbitrary measure of skill in the "original" definition you are referring to?

If not, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with any entry level programmer referring to themselves as a hacker.

>> A lot of insecure people who need cool names use it to describe themselves. There's no substance and no way to verify their claims. This is like ghetto cars with neon lights and flaps.

That analogy isn't helpful. How does the so-called dilution of the "hacker" term relate to "ghetto" cars with neon lights?

When people say "sexism," that's a big part of what they mean. It's not necessarily treating women as if they're inferior to men, but rather creating an environment -- sometimes knowingly, usually not -- where women don't feel comfortable or welcome because they are women.

Pinching butts, whistling, making sexual advances, hiring unqualified men over qualified women, etc. are all ham-handed ways of creating that environment.

But sexism is also embedded in things like our instinct to comment first on a woman's appearance, call them "girls" instead of "women," and constantly sexualize them in small and seemingly insignificant ways.