Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I've applied to Hacker School twice and found them to be short, impersonal and sometimes even rude to me during the interview process. They asked questions that struck me as inviting me to participate in "dickwaving" rather than talking about the nuance of my work or the problems I've engaged with. Such as "what's the hardest thing you have ever done?"
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.
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!
"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."
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.
What you refer to as "dickwaving" is them attempting to understand your eye for detail. Great hackers often have fantastic eyes for detail. You might have one, but you missed your chance to demonstrate it by interpreting this so negatively.
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
That's exactly my point. I've read the hacker school manual. I'm suggesting that they are not very good at practicing what they preach, at least in my experience applying to hacker school.
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.
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.