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Years ago I spent an evening at Recurse Center (at the time Hacker School) in NYC. My employer sent me with some recruiters to chat with participants about hir

Years ago I spent an evening at Recurse Center (at the time Hacker School) in NYC. My employer sent me with some recruiters to chat with participants about hiring possibilities. It was just so cool. That night I met Julia (she and a friend were, if I remember correctly, trying to boot a handwritten kernel in a VM and figured it out around 11pm that only the first 300 bytes were getting loaded into memory). I met Andrew Kelley, who had recently written an NES emulator that translated the code to LLVM (if I remember correctly). I briefly met Filippo Valsorda. I think he was the person who, after I said I wanted to make a bitcoin arbitrage bot, immediately came up with putting the prices into a matrix and then computing optimal paths. The place just seemed.. magical. I have a family and kids in Canada but i thought a long time about trying to reorient my life to NYC for a bit. It was just so cool. It reminded me of the joy of learning for the sake of learning, hacking stuff because it feels like a magic superpower to bring ideas to life, and the joy of building things you have no intention on trying to make money off of. I'm certain none of those people remember me but I remember the evening fondly whenever I see any of them show up on HN. Cheers :)

forgotmypw17 6y ago
I have a lot of respect for Recurse Center, and am a fan of the work that comes out of it. However, I feel that it is a very exclusive place, and if you are not good enough, you're just not welcome. I applied for an internship there a couple years ago. After writing an essay on why I want to do RC, and an interview where, IIRC, I shared my camera but my interviewers did not, I was rejected with a boilerplate "not for us" explanation, and that was that. I would've felt much better about it if they had at least invited me to visit, but this experience gave it a very corporate and impersonal feel.
- 4gotunameagain 6y ago
  To be honest, elitism in such places keeps them awesome. Not everything is for everyone, despite how much modern movements want to believe so.
  - akavel 6y ago
    [citation needed]
    - daseiner1 6y ago
      tragedy of the commons
      - burtness 6y ago
        Is there a particular one you have in mind?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    I think the strategy you describe works to an extent, but eventually leads to echo chamber effect. I think, perhaps arrogantly, that RC would have benefited from my pollination. We'll both be fine on our own, too.
- ponker 6y ago
  There are places where passion isn’t enough, only performance is what counts. The NBA, Recurse Center, Navy Seals, etc.
  - mi_lk 6y ago
    I get why you're downvoted, but it's not inaccurate
    - peruvian 6y ago
      I can't speak for the NBA or Navy, but it's not true for RC. I was a pretty meh developer when I got in 2016. Technical questions in the interviews are a magnitude simpler than any job interview I've ever had. Most people don't have the skills Julia and the other people the original post mentioned. They're honestly the 1% of RC's over 1k (I think!) students over the years. Most of us have little projects that we work on for 12 weeks in a great environment or learn new things. Most of us are normal people who are lucky enough to be able to study programming for 12 weeks in NYC.
- mattgreenrocks 6y ago
  I think the danger here is thinking that RC is the only place that cool people reside. RC has excellent marketing. There needs to be more places like it rather than everyone thinking that there can only be one place that everyone tries to get into.
  - quadrifoliate 6y ago
    This. Why are there not more places (or for that matter, workplaces) like RC?
    - vaibhavsagar 6y ago
      Why there aren't more places like Recurse Center: creating and sustaining a space for self-directed learning is a difficult and mostly thankless job. It also doesn't pay particularly well, the last job posting I found[1] mentions a $100,000 salary. Why there aren't any workplaces like the Recurse Center: no company will give you the total freedom to pursue your own programming interests 100% of the time, especially if they conflict with the larger goals of the company. 1: https://www.recurse.com/blog/146-why-you-should-work-at-rc https://www.recurse.com/blog/146-why-you-should-work-at-rc
- peruvian 6y ago
  > However, I feel that it is a very exclusive place, and if you are not good enough, you're just not welcome. What do you mean by this? RC is a company (a YC company actually) that leases expensive NYC real estate and bears all the other costs of running a company while providing its service for free. Unfortunately, it's not a hangout where anyone can join and thus they have to limit space. As for "if you are not good enough"... all the tech interview questions (at least in 2016) are easier or simpler than real job interview questions. The important parts are the soft skills questions. I "studied" with PhDs, bootcamp grads, and college students. And personally, I'm a pretty meh developer. But just like any company, they don't always give the best feedback on rejections.
  - vaibhavsagar 6y ago
    RC is not a YC company.
    - peruvian 6y ago
      Listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Y_Combinator_startups#2009%E2%88%922010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Y_Combinator_startups#...
- epoch_100 6y ago
  > I was rejected with a boilerplate "not for us" explanation, and that was that. For what it's worth, RC has struggled with the question of whether to give personalized feedback to applicants who don't get in. They did it for awhile, but stopped for a number of reasons. They explain it here: https://www.recurse.com/feedback https://www.recurse.com/feedback
  - gentryb 6y ago
    While I may question their reasoning, I respect them for putting it out there. Ultimately totally turned off to this based on the elitism crap. I did enjoy the article quite a bit though.
- vaibhavsagar 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "internship", I don't think RC has ever offered those. I was rejected the first time I applied to do a batch at RC. I applied again a few months later and was accepted.
- smabie 6y ago
  I don't understand, what does Recurse Center actually do? Like, why would I want to go? Do I get money? Or do they fund start-ups? Their website isn't very helpful in answering these questions. Apparently I get to work on the "edge of my programming ability," but why wouldn't I just do that on my own?

forgotmypw17 6y ago

I have a lot of respect for Recurse Center, and am a fan of the work that comes out of it. However, I feel that it is a very exclusive place, and if you are not good enough, you're just not welcome. I applied for an internship there a couple years ago. After writing an essay on why I want to do RC, and an interview where, IIRC, I shared my camera but my interviewers did not, I was rejected with a boilerplate "not for us" explanation, and that was that. I would've felt much better about it if they had at least invited me to visit, but this experience gave it a very corporate and impersonal feel.

4gotunameagain 6y ago
To be honest, elitism in such places keeps them awesome. Not everything is for everyone, despite how much modern movements want to believe so.
- akavel 6y ago
  [citation needed]
  - daseiner1 6y ago
    tragedy of the commons
    - burtness 6y ago
      Is there a particular one you have in mind?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  I think the strategy you describe works to an extent, but eventually leads to echo chamber effect. I think, perhaps arrogantly, that RC would have benefited from my pollination. We'll both be fine on our own, too.
ponker 6y ago
There are places where passion isn’t enough, only performance is what counts. The NBA, Recurse Center, Navy Seals, etc.
- mi_lk 6y ago
  I get why you're downvoted, but it's not inaccurate
  - peruvian 6y ago
    I can't speak for the NBA or Navy, but it's not true for RC. I was a pretty meh developer when I got in 2016. Technical questions in the interviews are a magnitude simpler than any job interview I've ever had. Most people don't have the skills Julia and the other people the original post mentioned. They're honestly the 1% of RC's over 1k (I think!) students over the years. Most of us have little projects that we work on for 12 weeks in a great environment or learn new things. Most of us are normal people who are lucky enough to be able to study programming for 12 weeks in NYC.
mattgreenrocks 6y ago
I think the danger here is thinking that RC is the only place that cool people reside. RC has excellent marketing. There needs to be more places like it rather than everyone thinking that there can only be one place that everyone tries to get into.
- quadrifoliate 6y ago
  This. Why are there not more places (or for that matter, workplaces) like RC?
  - vaibhavsagar 6y ago
    Why there aren't more places like Recurse Center: creating and sustaining a space for self-directed learning is a difficult and mostly thankless job. It also doesn't pay particularly well, the last job posting I found[1] mentions a $100,000 salary. Why there aren't any workplaces like the Recurse Center: no company will give you the total freedom to pursue your own programming interests 100% of the time, especially if they conflict with the larger goals of the company. 1: https://www.recurse.com/blog/146-why-you-should-work-at-rc https://www.recurse.com/blog/146-why-you-should-work-at-rc
peruvian 6y ago
> However, I feel that it is a very exclusive place, and if you are not good enough, you're just not welcome. What do you mean by this? RC is a company (a YC company actually) that leases expensive NYC real estate and bears all the other costs of running a company while providing its service for free. Unfortunately, it's not a hangout where anyone can join and thus they have to limit space. As for "if you are not good enough"... all the tech interview questions (at least in 2016) are easier or simpler than real job interview questions. The important parts are the soft skills questions. I "studied" with PhDs, bootcamp grads, and college students. And personally, I'm a pretty meh developer. But just like any company, they don't always give the best feedback on rejections.
- vaibhavsagar 6y ago
  RC is not a YC company.
  - peruvian 6y ago
    Listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Y_Combinator_startups#2009%E2%88%922010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Y_Combinator_startups#...
epoch_100 6y ago
> I was rejected with a boilerplate "not for us" explanation, and that was that. For what it's worth, RC has struggled with the question of whether to give personalized feedback to applicants who don't get in. They did it for awhile, but stopped for a number of reasons. They explain it here: https://www.recurse.com/feedback https://www.recurse.com/feedback
- gentryb 6y ago
  While I may question their reasoning, I respect them for putting it out there. Ultimately totally turned off to this based on the elitism crap. I did enjoy the article quite a bit though.
vaibhavsagar 6y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "internship", I don't think RC has ever offered those. I was rejected the first time I applied to do a batch at RC. I applied again a few months later and was accepted.
smabie 6y ago
I don't understand, what does Recurse Center actually do? Like, why would I want to go? Do I get money? Or do they fund start-ups? Their website isn't very helpful in answering these questions. Apparently I get to work on the "edge of my programming ability," but why wouldn't I just do that on my own?