Hacker School announces fall applications and residencies

https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/4-fall-2012-applications-open

by nicholasjbs • 14 years ago

90 30 14 years ago

jconnolly• 14 years ago

Love the residency idea. Good luck processing the next batch guys.

I'm a student in the current batch of Hacker School. I wrote a testimonial that is not up on the internet, yet, so I thought I'd reproduce it here. Hope you guys find it helpful.

tl;dr: go.

There are eight elements of Hacker School.

First, it is unusually supportive and safe. You can ask a question to clarify something you feel you ought to know, because you will get a gentle, illuminating answer. You can write a piece of code that you worry is shitty, then shape it into something beautiful with a fellow Hacker Schooler. You are isolated from all the people whose opinion might matter to you: your friends, your family, potential employers, the internet. In short, there are no negative consequences to showing your weaknesses.

Second, it is structured. If you feel awkward in social situations, you find that you always have a place. When you program on Hacker School days, there is always a desk to sit at. At the social gatherings, you discover that everyone at Hacker School is kind and inclusive. No one is ever left standing on their own.

Third, Hacker School is an uncontrollable situation. You are guided towards the things that it is important for you to work on. This invisible hand is the aggregate of the projects that other people are working on, the fellow students who walk up and offer to work with you on your project, the subjects covered in the Hacker School library, the languages your fellow students discuss at lunch, the juicy problem your deskmates are wrestling with, and the gentle guidance of the faculty. This invisible hand plainly shows you what you have been avoiding learning, what you thought was too hard, what you didn't know you needed to know, what you didn't know interested you.

Fourth, it is a place where programming is the most important thing in the world. Imagine Florence in the fifteenth century, except, instead of painting, everyone is inventing how to program, and instead of being surrounded by Donatello and Ghiberti and Botticelli and Raphael, you are working with the startlingly sharp programmers who no one has heard of, yet. The fact that it is socially acceptable to think about programming and talk about programming and work on programming means that programming is uppermost in your mind. Which means that you get better at it very fast. (This element was copped from Paul Graham's essay on aesthetic taste: paulgraham.com/taste.html)

Fifth, there are almost no constraints on what you work on. Your project doesn't have to make money, doesn't have to build your portfolio of open source code, doesn't have to be useful, doesn't have to appeal to some particular community, doesn't have to be cool, doesn't have result in something commensurate with the effort you put in. There is one constraint: work at the edge of your programming capabilities. Which is to say: work on something that makes you a better programmer.

Sixth, there are people who are better than you and people who are worse than you. Even if you are the most inexperienced programmer in the whole of Hacker School, you certainly know more than others about a particular operating system. Even if you are the most experienced programmer, you certainly know less than others about a particular language.

Seventh, you get to talk to and work with people who have truly brilliant minds. Some are fellow students at Hacker School. Some are drafted in as speakers or co-hackers. All are your peers.

Eighth, and most importantly, Hacker School is an expression of the faculty: Sonali, Nick, Dave, Alan and Tom. They are the people you'd want teaching you because they explain things clearly and they know a lot. They are the people you'd want to be friends with because they are nurturing and fun and funny. They are the people you'd want to have with you if you got into trouble because they would impose themselves on the situation and start fixing it. In short, they examine their environment and make it better.

And:

Having David Nolen explain the ClojureScript compiler was one of the intellectual highlights of my life.

The hours at Hacker School feel precious.

This is the fastest period of learning in my life.

I'm coming back.

wyclif• 14 years ago

Apparently the only way you can qualify for financial assistance is to be a woman. While I think that's great, and I understand why they are doing it that way (we really do need more women in programming), it leaves some men who validly need a hand up out in the cold.

nicholasjbs4• 14 years ago

We agree -- we'd love to be able to provide financial support to everyone we accept to Hacker School. It's another "what if" we've asked ourselves. We're not there yet, but we might get there someday.

pleasebehonest• 14 years ago

It's disgusting.

You ignore underprivileged male hackers because too many other hackers are male? How is that fair?

I'm sorry, but we aren't going to help you. Why? You have the wrong organ between your legs. Next!

Are you sure what you're doing is even legal? What do you do about trans/intersex applicants, or do they not matter to you?

duaneb2• 14 years ago

Numbers: ~20% of undergrad CS majors are women. 23/51 hacker school students are women. Assuming that people applied in proportions roughly equal to the undergraduate degree ratio (a large assumption, I am sure), that means that 4 times the men are applying to only 1.2x more slots - that is, the average woman has ~3.3x better chance to get into the school than the average male. Why is it that balanced gender is worth (apparently) far more than the other qualities? Why is it that even with the large admission boost you offer financial aid - surely the former would be enough to attract enough women (or things are worse than I thought!)

Note that all of this is just curiosity. I'm happy to see such proactive courting of women in CS, but I've never seen anyone else push so hard for it without being explicitly for the advancement of women in CS.

EDIT: reading the site, one segment sticks out at me as seemingly answering my question:

>We're not going to lower the bar for female applicants. It frustrates us a little that we feel the need to say that, and we think it underlines the sexism (intentional and not) that so pervades the programming world.

It's simple statistics that implies this, not sexism. Consider the following assumptions:

A) There are fewer women programmers than male programmers in the world. B) Women programmers and male programmers have an equal skill distribution. C) People apply to the program in ratios reflecting the "real world".

Therefore, the enrollment should also reflect the real world. Clearly, this is false, so one of my assumptions is false - C is the suspect one.

Anyway, I'm extremely happy with what you're doing. Keep up the good work.

Jun8• 14 years ago

"The result? Twenty three of the 51 students in our current batch are female, and Hacker School is much better for it."

Though I applaud HS's initiative and Etsy's sponsorship, it would've been nice to outline why HS is "much better" now that half the students are female.

nicholasjbs4• 14 years ago

I started writing about the benefits (and challenges) of having many more women in the batch (while simultaneously growing by 2.5x), but I felt the post was already way too long.

I hope to write a separate post on the subject before too long (maybe in September, after this batch ends and I have a bit more time).

wavesounds• 14 years ago

NPR recently had a great report[1] on women in the sciences they said "When women were reminded — even subtly — of the stereotype that men were better than women at math, the performance of women in math tests measurably declined" so one might think that this living expense would reinforce that stereotype, however they concluded that "In order to boost the numbers of women who choose to go into those fields, you have to boost the number of women who are in those fields." Which is exactly what this stipend will do and hopefully that positive will out way any perceived negative. I think its a great experiment and you might want to reach out to the researchers in this report to see if they would be interested in what you're doing.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2012/07/12/156664337/stereotype-threat-wh...

xiaoma• 14 years ago

For women who get into this program, great! You're set and will probably have an easy time finding work afterwards!

When recently moved back to the US with a basic programming foundation, I really wanted to get into this sort of school. I moved back with the primary motivation of becoming a top notch programmer. As a guy with my background, these kinds of programs aren't easy to get into! In general they all have a pretty strong desire to invite more women, and there are an awful lot of guys that want the training.

Without the option of this kind of top-notch program or others like it, I joined the local ruby meetup group and kept an eye out for any kinds of free instruction... and found that all were railsbridge (women only unless you're invited by a female participant). If you're already at a level where you can build some things, there are a lot more options like going to hack night and asking for feedback on what you've already built, but there's not much if you're not to that point yet.

If anybody reading this now is in the situation I was a couple of months ago, I strongly recommend the Coursera SaaS course through Berkeley. Obviously it doesn't compare to scholarships and in-person teaching, but there are free lectures, automated program graders, forums with active participants, study groups, and even human feeback on the quizzes. It's got pretty much all of the positives of Open Courseware, Code School (also great) and more videos rolled into one. It's open to people anywhere in the world, it's subtitled in several languages and everything except the optional textbook is free.

I'm not trying to hijack the thread-- this is a genuine attempt to help others who are in the same boat I was in until I found this.

https://www.coursera.org/course/saas

suyash• 14 years ago

Sucks...that you're in East coast..we need to open a better hacker school in SF Bay Area

T_S_• 14 years ago

If anybody would like to run something like this at Hacker Dojo in Mtn. View, let's discuss.

mnicole• 14 years ago

Would like something like this up in the Pacific Northwest as well.

ianstallings• 14 years ago

But how can you be a real hacker when you haven't been steeled by the flames of IRC and newsgroups? Maybe you should do some sessions where the experts call you a noob in very eloquent ways.

Seriously though, I'm glad this happened. I'm glad programming is being taken seriously as a craft and not ending up a side note of the curriculum. Keep us informed!

dev46nyc• 14 years ago

What's the avg age of the participants? Do you find any interest from 40+ year old developers applying in order to refresh their skills?

nicholasjbs4• 14 years ago

We're open to and welcome programmers of all ages. We don't ask for age or keep stats on this, so we don't know for sure. Anecdotally, most of our students are in their 20s and 30s, but we've had some in their late teens and a couple in their 40s.

Tichy• 14 years ago

I think 50% of attendees being in their 40s would be a desirable goal...

klaut• 14 years ago

Do the applicants have to be Usa citizens? Can somebody from Europe apply as well?

vitno2• 14 years ago

yea! There are many people in the current batch from Europe.

Hacker School announces fall applications and residencies

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