Apply to the Winter 2014 Batch of Hacker School
hackerschool.com
hackerschool.com
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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 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.)
Also, to clarify, the grants are funded by other companies, not Hacker School (the most recent sponsors are Dropbox, Etsy, Jane Street, Tapad, and Tumblr: https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/26-dropbox-etsy-jane-stree...).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Source: I'm a current Hacker School student
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).
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.
Don't stress about it too much!
You're welcome.
edit: previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6450472