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Agreed entirely. I only meant that when you choose do work harder than you have to, the necessary trade off is that you're sacrificing time with other people you love.

A typical dev could probably work 60% of a normal schedule and afford a comfortable life for their family. You could go home at 1pm every day and that'd be fun, but you can also sacrifice a bit of that and make change.

IMO, life without friends and family is wasted.

Sorry guys, I know the typography needs works. The orange-on-grey is tough on my color-blind eyes. We've been stretched thin getting ready for this conf (CodeMash) and launching Hungry Academy.

Thanks Allan, I hope people get excited about this.

I really believe there's going to be a kid out there with some junky computer, a dial-up net connection, who participates in what we're doing and becomes a developer. If one of those makes it, then it's worth it.

Go the non-developer route.

Awesome!

Send more details questions to hungryacademy at livingsocial dot com.

Maybe a library with a webcam-equipped computer? Friend with a camera phone? Volunteer somewhere for a few hours in exchange for using their equipment?

Yep, that's my understanding -- it's basically "we spent $xx,xxx training you, then you left. We think you owe us $yy,yyy."

That being said, it's a company of humans. What good is a developer who's shackled to their desk while a spouse is distressed in another state? None. There will be a way to work it out. We want you to be happy and great at building software, not imprisoned.

Apply, then if you're accepted I'll call your parents.

I think the calendar/rush is a bigger problem than the will/funding. I will do my best, for future iterations, to invite the world.

It won't be required, but I'll strongly encourage people to join me in volunteering with CodeNow, a program teaching dev skills to high school kids.

Check out http://codenow.org/ and scroll way down for the video of me trying to eat a jar of jelly.

I'm sorry, I was mixed up about this. It's still possible for future iterations of the program, but for this one they've decided "no."

One big motivation for the video is that it's much harder to fake. It's easy to have my friend write some BS essay for me and submit it for a job, it's a lot harder to do it on camera.

Effective development teams are powered by communication in code, writing, and face-to-face. To be a really excellent candidate, we need all three.

If face-to-face is something people feel uncomfortable with, there are still SO MANY great opportunities to be a developer -- they're just not the right fit for our team.

I don't think they're common, at least not in the dev world. One of my training clients runs a six month "get familiar with the company" program where new hires do different jobs -- it's the same spirit but totally different intensity. Theirs is like "hey, it's better than an intership" and ours is like "this is more valuable than college. Work hard, learn hard."

I expect there will be many "technology switcher" applicants and am working to have diverse skill sets represented -- including those of us who've been developing for awhile.

I would say do the Gist essay, and at the close of the essay say "And I'm getting started with programming, here's a Github repo".

That way you'd get past the person who's checking "Did this applicant follow the directions (submitting only two URLs)?" But we can (likely) check out the code during the in-depth review.

The LivingSocial in house team knocked it out in a couple hours -- they're crazy good. I couldn't believe we used "found light" in a hallway and had respectable results.

You should probably talk straight to the HR people who have all the expertise/knowledge about these things. Email them at hungryacademy at livingsocial dot com.

This detail is still under discussion, but I anticipate people will fan out to some of the other LivingSocial offices like Seattle, Boulder, or other up-and-coming spots.

It's unlikely that you could remote from home / some other place because we want to keep the in-person mentorships alive.

The program is onsite-only and the content is directed by what you need for the LivingSocial engineering team, which means Ruby, Rails, and many other related technologies. Sorry!

I wish I could say more about the salary.

Let's say that I taught middle school and high school for five years, and both the training period and job afterwards pay WAY more than I ever got.

As a mortgage man and father of two, I totally agree. If you have ideas on how we can make this work for people in your position, please let me know.

I thought about it being similar to one spouse working crazy hard while the second goes to law school for the eventual payoff future. Five months is a lot easier than three years, especially thinking about the $150K you'd owe.

So it's not easy, but I think it will be possible. I really hope that some join us, because there's no one hungrier than a person working to provide for the ones they love. Families teach you so much about work/life balance, how to do things efficiently, and how to smile -- things I'm looking for in our applicants.

I wouldn't say internship, because to me that means "some learning, some stapling / paper folding."

Our dream is that this program is "better than college." There are people out there that want to do what we do, we want them, so we need to help them build the skills to do it.

To be honest, if it were up to me I'd take only people who didn't have a programming background.

If you look at our community, so many great people don't have the traditional background. Chad was a professional saxophone player. Others studied philosophy, education, economics, or didn't study at all.

We're trying to solve the single biggest problem in our industry: talent shortage.If we accept only programmers, then we're not growing the pool. People with a CS background will get jobs as developers somewhere, I want to find the amazing people who aren't yet a part of this community but are hungry (zing) to join us.

Logistically, LivingSocial has a massive recruiting and HR team who can help out with the screening. Add in a team of a hundred engineers who are eager to find their next awesome colleague, and we have plenty of labor.

I don't have permission to talk specific numbers in public and it's not really my part of the program -- but expect the during program salary to be a reasonable living wage in our expensive city and the full post-academy salary to be at or above other beginning developer positions.

I've been teaching programming for eight years now, and I'd say "What we do isn't that hard." If we were writing 3D game engines, yes we'd need insane levels of math, theory, etc.

But writing web applications is mostly about following smart patterns, getting something done, done quickly, then improving the hotspots that need it. I can teach you to do that in five months, no problem.

Then it just takes a lifetime of practice to be, truly, good.

Totally agree. I'm taking a lot of lessons from my time in Teach for America where they pushed us hard but still fostered the love for each other, the program, and of course our students.

Check out the instructions for the application and you'll see that, if you're a developer, we specifically ask for a project posted on Github.

Sorry you didn't dig the video. I'm happy to have one where I don't say "Damn, I look stupid/fat/messy/blah" :)

We're engineers -- not pretty people. We don't care what your face looks like, but watching you explain who you are and what you're good at can give great insight into your personality.

The application is more about whether you feel like a good fit for the team than it is your programming skills. It doesn't mean "do you look good", it doesn't mean "is your English great," and it doesn't mean "Does this look like I 'expect' a programmer to look?"

We're trying to find out "is this a person I want to spend every day of my career with?"

We'd LOVE to bring everyone out for one of our in-person sessions, but are expecting a thousand applications for our 24 spots. Getting all those people in one place would be a massive undertaking and a huge waste of time for the 976 who aren't selected.

LivingSocial started with the name "HungryMachine" and one of the company's core values is "Live Hungry" -- that's the inspiration.

We don't want to exploit anyone, hah. In fact, it's quite the opposite -- we want to bring more people into this ridiculously bountiful world of software development.