Training programmers in 10 short weeks? Albeit these have experience with programming via codecademy, but 10 weeks? That is a fantastic turnaround and sounds a bit too marvelous. How does it work? This is just the first batch, but does it work consistently? This is fascinating.
Do the programmers at Hackbright have any particular traits? Ambition, drive, or a ridiculous work ethic? Surrounding themselves with the help of coworkers, or something else?
I'm somewhat incredulous at the short time span, but maybe that's enough because of the small class size and perhaps the involved teaching style. And if that's enough to let graduates intern at a company... well.
Thanks for your message and the kind words. This is our second batch. We trained 12 students in our first class, and 16 in the second (graduated on Friday). Our students do have the qualities you mentioned: ambition, drive, strong work ethic, and technical aptitude. I think it helps that they are surrounded by a supportive and encouraging community.
Looking into the article, they don't start from zero:
It helps that Hackbright students usually aren’t starting from scratch, but have instead developed their initial skills using Codecademy or by attending development workshops. After all, Phillips said, Hackbright is for people who are serious about programming as a profession, and you can’t decide that you’re serious until you’ve tried it out.
So as I see it's for somebody who knows some basic programming but wants to get some skills that would get her hired.
I think you would be surprised to know what level I started at. Everything I had learned about backend development was passed up within two or three days, and that Friday we went over HTML and CSS, which passed up everything I knew about that. Hackbright is, of course, no easy road. In fact, I can easily say it was harder than all of my AP courses in high school, harder than moving to a German city where I knew no one, harder than deciding to jump into the marriage boat (trust me, that was difficult), and harder than even the decision to make such an investment. And that's why it's worth it. Of course we'll all continue learning, just as every programmer does, but Hackbright was a fabulous kick in the right direction.
She has a physics degree from Duke, and back when we were freshmen together, was considering majoring in CS, among other technical majors. I'm not sure how representative she is of the batch, but for people with existing technical skills/background, 10 weeks of focused coding practice + feedback could be a pretty big help.
They also have the same with "24 hours"... For the slow readers among us I guess. Given the 10-minute book on PHP has 264 pages, it's about 26 pages per minute, or a little more than 2 seconds per page, not counting the time it takes to turn the pages. One must be really quick.
Do the programmers at Hackbright have any particular traits? Ambition, drive, or a ridiculous work ethic? Surrounding themselves with the help of coworkers, or something else?
I'm somewhat incredulous at the short time span, but maybe that's enough because of the small class size and perhaps the involved teaching style. And if that's enough to let graduates intern at a company... well.
This program definitely looks exciting.