What a great story. You kept trying out different models until you found something awesome. I have to say when I ran my last company I hated picking up the phone only to hear some "IT recruitment expert" who has never fired up terminal droning on. Conversely, I would love to call you guys up when I start another company. Good luck!
Since it's only 3 weeks, I don't think you Hacker School has too much problem accepting foreign students. But it will be a problem for startups trying to hire? Or they're OK aout trying a foreign employee?
A suggestion: Hacker School don't provide certification or grading, but you could set a page with the names of the students for future reference.
I'm really thinking about taking a 3-week vacations and try Hacker School after I finish my Master of Science degree. Even if it's just to learn more :)
Since it's only 3 weeks, I don't think you Hacker School has too much problem accepting foreign students.
The program's actually three months, not three weeks. That's still short enough for tourist visas (I think, but obviously IANAL).
The companies we work with are split on visas; in general, the larger the company the easier it is for them to do, since they can plan farther in the future (it can take months or more for visas to come through). The other issue is that I don't think you're allowed to seek employment while you're visiting the country and then get sponsorship; you're supposed to get sponsorship before you come (again, IANAL).
Feel free to email me (nick at hackerschool.com) if you have other questions. We'd love to find a way to make Hacker School more accessible for people outside the US. The primary reason to do Hacker School is to become a better programmer, so I think it's worth it even if the US's crazy immigration policy makes staying after the batch a pain.
> USCIS will usually allow a non-immigrant to enter the US to attend a specific pre-arranged job interview in visitor status.
The implication is that you go for the interview on-site, but do not attempt to actually work; you first have to back to your country then go through the normal H1-B (or other such visa) process.
Of course that's not directly applicable to people holding visitor status that want to look for jobs after attending Hacker School. Attending the School might not be allowed in the first place.
If you're getting a lot of non-US candidates (either for Hacker School or directly to Hackruiter), I think it would be a good idea to consult an immigration lawyer.
Is it possible to attend this on a B1/B2 visa ? I have been looking for a course like this all my life. I am not particularly interested in a job offer at the end (although wouldn't mind if something interesting comes up) but I just want to attend to improve my skills.
What about having your students develop and launch a mock startup? Building small apps and going over books is great, but I think students can learn a lot more real world dev by actually doing it. You can still emphasize code quality, agile practices, working together on a team, etc. Put up everything on github and as they develop the startup make sure they are contributing back to whatever open source software they are using.
Im assuming most of your students are interested in working for startups so giving them a mock startup experience would be a plus for them and also for the startups they eventually work for.
We have made an effort to make sure that Hacker School is not about startups and products. This is mostly from experience in prior batches: students who worked on producty or startupy ideas didn't get nearly as much out of the batch as students who were working on more technical stuff.
Also, in NYC specifically, we feel that there isn't as much of a pure "hacker" scene. It's too intermingled with the startup world. We're trying to do our part to fix that.
While we're very much not about launching startups or products, we already do much of what you suggest. We encourage people to write useful code and build or contribute to open source projects. Hacker Schoolers frequently collaborate and pair. Everyone puts their code on Github. We emphasize code quality and writing clean, maintainable code you're proud of.
I was in batch[1] and worked on the back end of a startup simultaneously, but not while on HS time. Having had the experience, I wouldn't recommend HS if you're more interested in startups than you are in programming. The goals are completely different. The measure of a startup's success can be directly observed, but you can't simply observe an overwhelming sense of curiosity or the triumphal sense of discovery. The reason I'm interested in startups is that it's a way to spend all of your time creating things that enrich other people's lives, which is exactly what we try to do at HS.
Then you have the concept of ownership and monetary gain, but nobody really owns HS projects, they just happen. There are no contracts or points, there is only the joy of programming. When you naturally put people together that are all working to better themselves in the same way, they wind up cooperating. It's much easier to cooperate on something that's already shared.
Now that's not to say that you can't do anything tangentially related to your startup while you are working on HS. I wrote and open-sourced a library that was tangentially related to my startup, but I did it as a learning experience; it wasn't mission-critical, it just scratched an itch. I wound up not using the project on my startup because it contacted an API that changed, which crushed my curiosity and caused me to stop working on it, but looming in the back of my head, it gave me some inspiration for the curiosity that HS satisfies.
In hindsight, I wish I had never written that library. Yes I learned from it, but my time would probably have been better spent reading Erlang and OTP in Action.
Me saying "mock startup" was probably a bad term to use, plus I'm probably missing the use case of hacker school. What I really meant was to work on something larger scale as a team. For an example make a clone of hn or reddit, do a web app and mobile, maybe even build multiple versions in different languages.
From Dave and Nick's reply it sounds like they tried something along those lines, but learned that people got a lot more value out of working on a number of various smaller sized projects, which is great.
ah ok, I understand. Yes, that's totally something we would do. Cloning, rewriting in a new language, or forking would be appropriate. It wouldn't make much sense to clone Reddit because it's already open source, but forking it and modifying it would be very appropriate.
We wrote four chat servers reminiscent of chat.nodejs.org in batch[1]; one with Brubeck (python), one with Chicago Boss (erlang), one with node.js, and then the Brubeck chat program was rewritten to work inside of a Spotify App, so yes we clone existing projects. But typically with a project like that, there's a lot of cool stuff in the beginning and you eschew some more tedious aspects that you would need for a real-world project, like, say... IE compatibility. Once you're housekeeping and your new work doesn't teach you much and doesn't give you cool things to show the rest of the group, it gets really boring really fast, and the environment naturally encourages you to do something more dynamic.
oh right, I left this out: we had a period in batch[1] where we all did team work. A number of Hacker Schoolers contributed to the async Python web framework, Brubeck (http://brubeck.io/), which was a batch[0] project. Perhaps batch[2] will contribute a bit to it, too.
Why all the hate against CS education? It's a tough balance between theory and vocation...but I think it's extremely short-sighted to think vocation should rule all.
It's not necessarily vocation. It's just building things. Craft is the word I use in my head. I enjoy CS a lot, but I primarily want to be a better craftsman. CS is a useful tool for me to get better at my craft, but my primary interest is in being good at building things.
