Hacker School: Where Students and Instructors Learn Together

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With recent advances in technology, we've seen unprecedented innovation in education — from online master's degrees to webinars, and new ways to collaborate with other students around the world. Furthermore, we've seen an enormous increase in software development programming courses such as Codecademy and Treehouse. In the midst of all the education reform and experimentation, Hacker School takes a very different approach to training the next generation of programmers.

No tuition. No grades. No teachers. No curriculum. Um, what?

Hacker School is a three-month, full-time school for programmers in New York City. It is completely free, and the lack of curriculum lets students focus on their passion projects, learning how to improve coding skills along the way. We spoke with Mary Rose Cook, a new facilitator at Hacker School about why the school chose such a hands-off model for teaching, what the company culture is like and what the plans are for the future.

Q&A With Mary Rose Cook, Facilitator at Hacker School

As a facilitator at Hacker School, what do you actually do? What does your day-to-day look like?

We just literally facilitate people becoming better programmers, sitting down and collaborating on code with students. So we'll work with them for maybe an hour to two, writing code for their projects. Then we lead by example — we're students as well as facilitators, and we have our own projects as well — so we try to work on cool, interesting things, both to keep us occupied and excited, and to act as inspiration for other people at our school.

Unlike most schools, Hacker School has no grades, teachers or formal curriculum. Why did you decide to go with this model?

We believe that people learn the best and have the most fun when they're doing something they are interested in.

We believe that people learn the best and have the most fun when they're doing something they are interested in. The problem with grades is that if you grade someone's work, whatever that work is, then the person who is working on it has something else as their main motivation now — they are no longer doing it for the sheer joy of it, or to learn something — then, they want to get a good grade, which means they're probably going to optimize for the wrong things.

If you try to study a subject expecting to be tested on it in an exam, you'll learn it in a more crammy, less deep way, because you're just trying to learn the things that you need to learn for the exam, rather than learning the things that are interesting to you. And if you don't do that, if you follow what you're interested in, then you'll probably enjoy learning it, and have more fun along the way. And you're going to explore way more areas of knowledge than you would have done otherwise, because you would have just stuck to the curriculum.

Also, grades are arbitrary in how well they show if you know something … we just feel like grades don't help at all.

I understand why you wouldn't have grades, but why wouldn't you have teachers or curriculum?

We feel like everyone is interested in different stuff, therefore a curriculum that we impose on people might negate their interests. They might not be interested in the things we think they should be interested in. The variety of projects is super wide. Some people are working on super technical computer design type stuff, and others are working on iPhone apps, and that is totally self-led.

There are some topics that are universally useful in their work as a programmer, but there actually aren't that many — to teach them, you can do it really informally, you can do it in five minutes, like, "Hey, you should check out this particular technique." You can explain it in five minutes, and if they find it interesting, that's great, and they'll go off and learn it. And if they don't, that's fine, but you haven't wasted any of their time.

So the idea of a curriculum based around these nuggets is useful and would, in the end, amount to maybe one or two hours, which is negligible.

How did you land your position at Hacker School?

I was a Hacker School student in the summer of 2012. They asked if I wanted to become an employee about a year ago. I've learned by far the most of my entire life while I was at Hacker School, and I was really excited about what Hacker School could do for other people, so I said yes immediately. Then it took about six months for me to get a visa, because I'm English, so I went back to England for a while, and then came back here about three months ago. So I've been working here for about three months.

Why do you love your job?

Well, number one, if I became an employee at Hacker School, I could continue to be a Hacker School student, because I learned so much and had so much fun. So that was part of it. I also felt like I wanted to help a lot more people learn in the way Hacker School was teaching people. So being a Hacker School student would account for half of my job, and the other half is just helping Hacker School students do the best work they can. It's sort of like being a private-sector academic. You have your own research that takes up half your time, and then the other half of the time, you have your Ph.D. students, and you help with their projects.

You're making your stuff, and at the same time, helping people make their own stuff. It seemed like the perfect idea. It's like an exchange of labor. I've been a professional programmer for about 10 years, but all of the jobs that I've had were intermittently enjoyable, but I really loved the programming I did in my spare time. Hacker School was a way to get paid for working on my part-time projects. All these things came together.

What is the most challenging part of your job?

People are messy, and as a programmer I like to find patterns in things, and to some extent people follow patterns — but sometimes they certainly don't. 

I often have to reinvent how to help people every time I work with someone

I often have to reinvent how to help people every time I work with someone, it makes it interesting, which is awesome, but also really tiring.

The other component is that I feel like if you're already at a certain point with learning a skill, whatever that skill is, it is hard to put yourself on the path of someone who is just learning a skill. This is kind of a fuzzy distinction — not necessarily for programming, but for a much narrower skill, say, riding a bicycle. If that person is still at the stage of falling off, whereas you can ride in a straight line, it's really hard to remember what it was like not to know how to ride in a straight line. When you're trying to teach something, it's really hard to remember being bad at something, so it's hard to remember how to summon the right advice. None of us facilitators, as far as I know, have any training as teachers. We're trying to learn as fast as we possibly can, but it's not like we've been teachers before, so I feel fraudulent in that regard.

What is the company culture like at Hacker School?

The general Hacker School culture is that everyone is super friendly. We try to make people feel unafraid to potentially look stupid, we try to make people okay with being educationally vulnerable. The way we do that is in a number of ways. Number one, we tell people, "Look, if you have a question, just ask. Don't worry about looking stupid. Nobody's going to judge you because it's not like your boss is there, or your mum." It's like being with your peers.

But we also have social rules that are designed to make everyone relaxed in an inclusive environment.

1. No "Well, actuallys": If you are having a discussion about some technical matter and one of the people makes a slight error in what they're saying, but that doesn't really pertain to the conversation, no one is allowed to say, "Well, actually," la la la. Then he or she explains the slight piece of knowledge that the person got wrong — because if the slight error that the person got wrong isn't relevant to the conversation, then the only reason that the other person is talking about it is just to be nit-picky and annoying. It doesn't help.

2. No feigning surprise — "You don't know what Mashable is?!": If you said to me, "Oh, I work for Mashable," and I said, "Oh, what's Mashable?" and you said, "You don't know what Mashable is?!" — you know I don't know what it is. You're just trying to make me feel bad, not help me learn something. There's no, like, "Oh, my God, I can't believe you don't know X."

3. No backseat driving.: Basically, if someone's working on something and you want to help out, then great, ask if you want to join in. But don't just lob advice across the room.

4. Avoid subtle sexism, racism, homophobia and any other -isms: It's all about how the person who feels offended feels. It's all about a person feeling uncomfortable just because of something you said.

Culture amongst Hacker School employees is an extension of the Hacker School session environment — it's like a microcosm of Hacker School, of inclusivity and vulnerability, and it's okay to have disagreements.

How will Hacker School evolve in the next five to 10 years?

There are three central questions that — and the other facilitators — think about a lot.

Number one, does Hacker School scale? We can do 70 students with eight facilitators at the moment. That's about 10 students to every one facilitator, so that's kind of scalable. But it's not exactly large-scale, the way a startup would be. So the question is, can we do 100 students with only one facilitator, or 1,000, or 10,000? That's question number one, and hopefully the answer is yes, but we don't know yet.

Number two: Is the model that we've come up with for helping people learn programming applicable to other domains? Can you have carpentry school or engineering school? Does the way we do things at Hacker School translate to other disciplines? If it does, that's super exciting. It may not. The question is, will this learning model expand to other disciplines?

The third question is: Can the culture be transmitted to satellites? Can there be a a Hacker School: London? San Francisco? Mumbai? That's the question that is the furthest off at the moment, but again, it's something we're thinking about, because we are still getting the culture right here.

Those three questions will be guiding the result of where Hacker School is going to be in five to 10 years.

Images courtesy of Hacker School