Hacker School: Summer 2012 Applications Open + Etsy Scholarships
hackerschool.com
hackerschool.com
I thought that Hacker School is an amazing idea since the first time I read about it. Now, it became something much more bigger, a response to the sexism that spread in software development (it's not an exclusive problem from U.S., but it's a start to inspire everyone else).
My congratulations to Hacker School team and to Etsy initiative.
I hope someday I can attend to some batch :)
Great experience. If I were asked to name one criticism off the top of my head, though, it would be "gender gap." It was my first foray into tech, and I was a bit taken aback. Now I'm acclimated, but it's great to see they've got the resources to try and tackle the gap head on. The school always draws quite a few tech-experienced people who were in nontechnical (and not male-dominated) fields. This means they can bypass the whole four-years-of-classes-with-only-dudes problem that comes with expecting any shift from academia.
See http://www.etsy.com/blog/news/2012/etsy-hacker-grants-suppor...
So this comes off not as giving aid to those who need it, but as incentivizing women to join Hacker School, which is something entirely different. It's not a bad thing, but it's not need based aid.
And, although this program is going to be effective, I'm not sure that it is going to create true equality. It's going to artificially inflate the number of women applying to hacker school, but I'm not sure that that is the right way to go about encouraging women to join Hacker School, and I'm not sure that this is going to result in true equality. The real goal should be to encourage the community of women programmers to apply to Hacker School on their own, and get it to a point where they can organically be half of the enrolled people. All this program does is compensate for the problem, not truly trying to fix it.
So, although I like this initiative and think that it definitely will help equalize Hacker School, I think that there are a few issues with it.
I felt very fortunate to have the money lying around to take three months off of work to attend Hacker School, and I imagine there is a large pool of entirely qualified candidates who are financially unable to make this work (several of them posted on HN last time around). If we assume happening to have the money socked away and being a passionate hacker are a bit independent, then this need-based aid for women will increase the number of entirely qualified women who are able to attend. This is the right, least-artificial way to "[encourage] the community of women programmers to apply to Hacker School on their own," as is possible for an organization that doesn't happen to run a k-12 educational program or other major institutional social change agent.
Although 5k for three months will modify the incentive structure, it's less than the average American income for that period, and your living expenses are going to increase if you're moving to NYC unless you're coming from Paris or similar. The only expected changes in the applicant pool are qualities I don't give a lick about, having to do with educational loans, having a job that can be done remotely for a few days a week, having money saved up, or personal financial conservatism (willingness to spend money on an unknown 3-month commitment). From what I've observed, Nick, Dave and Sonali are 100% about maintaining the excellent quality of people in their program, and I trust they will ensure that financial aid for women in no way undermines that.
This hopefully will "artificially inflate" (what wouldn't be artificial? just waiting until the problem is solved by someone else?) the number of women applying, some of whom will be accepted and hopefully become better hackers, contributing in a small way to fixing the problem. Should more drastic steps be taken at a primary / secondary / college education level to attempt to "organically" grow the community of women programmers? Sure, and I'll continue to vote for elected officials who say they'll try to fix this as I always have, but in the meantime the Etsy scholarships are trying to make concrete progress growing that community right now.
Keep up the great work!
I stand by what I have written in the past: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3436007
I was one of the lonely programmers Nick describes in the post - it's been fantastic to spend so much time with so many people I now hold in such high esteem.
I'm just wondering what the success rate is when helping people apply for jobs at the startups that I see at hackruiter. I would love to do this but am still uncertain about taking 3 months with no pay before I start applying for jobs. The alternative being apply while still working.
I am on the fence about applying. Anything anyone could say to sway me one way or the other is much appreciated. :D
If you do love programming, you should apply!
It's technically a 3BR, but currently one bedroom is a study (library and desk) and another is our drawing + modelmaking studio (you can use my soldering station if you'd like).
Also: If you can't make it this summer, our fall batch will start in September :)
Listen, I'm all for supporting women in engineering. There are many female engineers in my family. I just find it appalling that Etsy is willing to just throw money at one gender and not another. It's sexist garbage.
I see their motive, and i wholly support it. They could have taken a better line of play though; Rather than straight up gender segregating, why not organically filter the scholarship candidates based on female-oriented areas of study? Etsy is largely creative and industrious and driven women, so why not just sponsor projects that will naturally be female-led?
No offense to the hacker school guys and etsy guys, but this is straight up amateurish.
Do you think it's possible that rather than having negative, sexist motives for offering scholarships, they are simply going out of their way to be _supportive_ to minorities in the field?
EDIT: MaxGabriel pointed out this article claims more women in a group improves performance [not equal numbers]. Thanks for the correction.
Let me make sure I'm clear: I love the idea of female engineers being given incentives to enter a male-dominated field. There are a myriad of great benefits to everyone involved. The trouble is, the methods they are using are previous-level.
Seriously, a group of hackers can't figure out a more elegant process? They are literally saying "If you are a girl and ask us for money we will give it to you". That's absurd. Lets see them set up a special fund or something for female-friendly fields rather than just throwing money at women outright.
I stand by my assertion that their methods are amateurish but their intents are good. I'd like to see the people who designed this program at least speak to the topic; what else they tried, why it didn't get approved, why it didn't work, et cetera. I just want to hold other engineers to rigor and examine their methods, especially when I find the goal noble but the methods sophomoric.
We never said that. This is what we said:
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.
But we want to say that now, so people don't have to waste time asking or debating the point. Women will be judged on the exact same scale as men. We think to do otherwise would be insulting and counterproductive. We care a lot about getting more women into Hacker School, but we won't do it at the expense of the quality of the batch.
HBR: But gender does play a role?
Malone: It's a preliminary finding--and not a conventional one. The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. But so far, the data show, the more women, the better.
Woolley: We have early evidence that performance may flatten out at the extreme end--that there should be a little gender diversity rather than all women.
It's called affirmative action, and some of the most highly regarded institutions in America have employed it for decades. I'm not making an appeal to authority in defense of affirmative action, I'm simply suggesting that there is nothing appalling, novel, or 'amateurish' about the practice.
The Etsy scholarships are an experiment to see if we can have a batch that's 50% women. If Etsy put half of the grant money towards men, it'd do less to help that goal. If this constitutes saying "to hell with them" to men who can't afford Hacker School, then we've been doing that from the start.
why not organically filter the scholarship candidates based on female-oriented areas of study?
This would break Hacker School. We don't accept people based on a specific area of study, nor do we let companies influence the projects students work on. We simply accept people who love programming and want to become better hackers in the fullest sense of the term.
> filter the scholarship candidates based on female-oriented areas of study
Yes, girls must play only with dolls, because only you (man) should play with the cool stuff.
Unless you're suggesting they 'hide' the discrimination. In which case, I don't support that position at all. Not only does that prevent discussions like the one we're having right now, it also just seems pathetic to not stand for what you believe in.
That should be self evident.
The only other possible explanation is that men are somehow inherently better suited for Hacker School, and I think we can all agree that that's sexist, and incorrect.
You might want to differentiate here on timescale: "Well, those men were systematically given their advantages a long time ago based on their gender, there are no time-proximal gender advantages." But it doesn't matter. There is no statute of limitations on sexism.
Plus, some of the gender-based advantages are proximal... like whether their marketing is written in a way that makes men want to apply, but women not want to... which was almost certainly the case, and I think still is.
So, given that there's already overwhelming, gender-based support for men, offering gender-based support for women seems like it's only leveling the playing field.
It is probably a good idea to get some health insurance for your whole stay, unless your country has some kind of arrangement with the U.S. to this effect (and I don't know if any country does). You can get insurance from your travel agency or separately online. Check the terms of your home insurance or credit card, if any. Some include some sort of travel insurance.
[1] http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/without/without_1990.html
[2] https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/
[3] Seriously!
I would love to see alternative methods to involve women more in coding rather than just paying them.
The current method just 'feels wrong' to me.
I've also seen programming competitions with a 'top female programmer' award but no 'top male programmer' award, which also feels wrong, even if the intent comes from a very positive place.
I've spoken w/ several female developers/engineers and they were not excited about that kind of structure.
Of course, if I were a female programmer who needed $5k and a kick in the pants to level up (e.g. if this had been around 2 years ago) I would probably jump at the chance, it's all a matter of perspective.
One of the issues is simply lack of good alternatives. How else would we encourage other female programmers to come out of the woodwork? Strong female leadership of the program would be a great start in my opinion. Women Who Code in San Francisco has a great, active, healthy Ruby study group going on which is arguably a mini-Hacker School. It's run by and for women, and there's been (as far as I know) zero issues getting enough people together for lively discussion. Plus, some of the newbies have explicitly said they preferred this all-women environment as they could ask the sort of questions they may self-censor elsewhere. Although that's hardly realistic of the real software engineering world - any full-time programmer has probably got to get used to working with men as well as women. :)
These scholarships don't give an artificial pat-in-the-back to anyone. Women are helped in aspects unrelated to those in which applicants are evaluated.
In any event, I'm interested in hearing about the alternatives you, and the females you've spoken with, propose.
If so, would have applied a longtime ago. Too late for me now, now i just follow the latest vulnerabilities people post on twitter.
Incidentally, have you ever read Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-The-Art-Exploitation-Edition/d...)? It's my favorite book on the subject.