It looks like a great opportunity, but I imagine it'll be a rare hacker who can find 32 daytime hours per week to do unpaid work. Maybe it's good for a college-aged hacker taking a semester off, or maybe for a self-employed contract dev who plans to pay the bills with off-hours contract work.
I'd love to see a bit of clarification about that part in the FAQ.
As a ten year developer I'd love to be able to participate in this sort of collective though. Maybe coworking + meetups makes a better fit for someone in my shoes.
I was in batch[1] and worked while doing HS. The plan was to work two days a week, but it quickly turned into two days a week for 10 hours plus some time in the evening after HS and some time on Sundays. But after 3 months, I learned two new programming language (JavaScript and Go), messed around with jQuery (before HS I couldn't even write an ajax request; that's how afraid of front-end development I was), contributed to a framework(http://brubeck.io/), put out my first pypi distribution (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/recurlib now deprecated, but still), wrote my first real-time web app (https://github.com/jordanorelli/chatify), twice (https://github.com/jordanorelli/gochat), met some of the most interesting people I know, and came out with a number of new friends. Oh, and in that off time, I also wrote a startup(http://barkbox.com/). Was it easy? Fuck no. I had no life outside of programming while it was going on, and I promptly took a much-needed rest from programming over the holiday break. It's difficult and definitely not for the faint of heart, but if you're willing to take three months to do nothing but code, it can be done. Thanks to HS, I'm a significantly stronger developer now than I was three months ago.
Would I change anything if I had to do it all over again? Well, I'd probably have started looking at Go and JavaScript a bit earlier ;)
We know it's a huge time commitment, but we think it's the best way to really get better. We've found that you get disproportional results when you switch from a "nights and weekends" mentality to a "this is the sole thing I'm focusing on" mentality.
The people who were in the last two batches were a mix of contract programmers, people who worked part time, and students.
Student loans would be a huge help but no one is going to get standard student loans unless Hacker School becomes an accredited institution which would be a huge amount of work and bureaucracy.
I'd love to see a bit of clarification about that part in the FAQ.
As a ten year developer I'd love to be able to participate in this sort of collective though. Maybe coworking + meetups makes a better fit for someone in my shoes.