I'm probably going to be in the minority here, but I find something very cliquish about the Recurse Center and the many high profile alums. At the end of the day, they seem like a fancy placement agency who happened to get some good developers attend their program.
I've also heard from certain of their _non_ high profile alums and they've spoken about feeling left out (because most of the others were hacking away in Python whereas she was a Ruby developer and felt isolated). Since then I take everything said and written about the Recurse Center with a grain of salt.
(I've visited and been a resident ... I guess I'm one of the non-high-profile ones). From my N=1 anecdotes during several visits, the vast majority of attendees were not "high profile" (whatever that definition is) ... and most people spent most time heads-down doing work or pairing/in-meetings talking about work. from what i observed, there was very little showboating. it's not like a 3-month TED conference or something :)
I applied twice and was rejected. I didn't get the impression it was cliquish, but they're in a difficult situation.
They write thoughtful blog posts on self-reflection, building an inclusive community and working hard to improve. These are values I identify with so it's disappointing not to be given an opportunity to participate, and no feedback after putting effort into the application. On the other hand they have a popular program and have to reject a lot of people.
It's unfortunate that your acquaintance felt that way. I'll offer my own account of RC being an incredibly welcoming space to people of all backgrounds. I appreciated the diversity in both breadth and depth of experience because it allowed people to grow and learn from one another in an environment that I haven't seen replicated anywhere else.
I am a non-high profile alum. While it is true that their fundamental business model is to find people jobs, they don't push that aspect of their business at all. They will try really hard to find you a job that fits you if you want to; but it's absolutely okay if you don't either. I personally attended just for self improvement and not for a job.
During my time at Recurse Center (hackerschool at the time), there were people programming away in a bunch of different languages. I didn't actually think python was a dominant one. Maybe it is now.
My best advice to anyone who wants to attend recurse center is that: you get out of it what you put into it. You are situated in a really great environment with a potentially deep pool of experience and knowledge. Don't expect to be spoon fed information. Actively go out and talk to people and pair program with people.
Somehow it's strange that a language difference as modest as between Python and Ruby should isolate people to the point where they can't fit in even on a 12-week retreat. I mean, that would probably happen to me if I went to a Ruby gathering, but it seems kinda wrong, a waste of talent that could be pooled and applied to more advanced projects instead.
On the other hand, maybe it's precisely because the two languages are similar?
In any large school that has been running for years, there are bound to be a few students out there who had poor experiences. On the whole I've heard good things about people's experiences with this one.
I've had to read the source of boto since there were some boto exceptions I was seeing in stack traces in the fabric deploy process - and ugh, I found the code to be not very intuitive and the documentation poor. Anyone else run into the same issues with boto?
I've found the documentation (not the codebase itself) to be very hit-or-miss. Some components are very well documented, some not at all. Presumably due to maturity of different parts of the stack and the Boto library, but still frustrating from an end-user perspective.
Terrible management and/or micromanagement is one of the key reasons a dev can lose motivation. It also doesn't do anyone's morale/motivation any favors to see colleagues get fired. If a manager has had to fire people, and do so repeatedly, then the fault is not so much with those getting fired than the organization/management/hiring process.
One of the key reasons why I've seen dev lose motivation after joining a company is lack of investment on the part of the manager in the employees future goals. I've been in situations during my entry-level days when my manager always made me draw the short straw - did wonders for my motivation.
It's also interesting to note that the company itself has grown from 13-55 people within that year. You'd imagine they'd have someone with a bit more experience managing the team (unless it's a team where the median age is, say, 23). Inexperienced managers are a bigger risk than inexperienced devs, and if I were at Imagur, I'd be wary of (and maybe also unmotivated by) a young manager trying to prove a point (or feature on the front page of HN).
But do companies explicitly say that, though? From my experience working at a YC startup, the company just used to send out a canned rejection email, irrespective of whether the candidate was rejected because of a bad interview or because someone thought they'd be a pain to work with. The startup I work at once had a staff/lead engineer from twitter interview, and while some loved him, some didn't and he was rejected.
A reasonably professional person will follow up with rejection emails in order to determine what was lacking so they can work on it. Companies who reject people should be ready to give useful feedback that people can use to improve their chances moving forward.
I recently interviewed at a company where I did the onsite tech interview one day, was then told I passed that and had to do a culture fit interview the next week. I did that, mainly with non-technical folk, and then got a standard rejection email the next day. I still find it a bit baffling - at the very least, they could've given me an idea of their culture (didn't seem very different from any standard issue tech company, IMO) and what exactly I was lacking.
That's part of the problem. How can you pin down what the person was lacking in that situation? Were they lacking "friendliness", "suaveness?" Were they not attractive enough? How many shortcomings which could be attributed to "culture fit" are actually things you could change?
Depends on the company you're interviewing with. But here's a description of how companies who insist on culture fit evaluate candidates.
Generally an onsite interview comprises of a series (minimum 2, may go up to 4) of technical interviews which might involve whiteboard coding or coding on a laptop (my current company use this approach - partly inspired by Stripe's interview process where candidates are told to bring their own laptops and use their language/editor/IDE of choice). The coding itself should take anything from 20 (very strong candidates) to 40 minutes, and the remaining 15-20 mins is used to ostensibly allow the interviewee to the interviewer(s) questions, and sometimes these questions/discussions are used to assess culture fit. Like, is the interviewee opinionated about something (which is them used to 'score' the interviewee between 1-10 on 'ego').
Some companies insist on 'lunch' with the candidate, which WOULD be nice if you're having lunch with your team members/engineers, but a lot of times these you're just shown the way to the cafeteria and told to help yourselves, where you find yourself among a sea of strangers laughing/talking about something and you try making small talk (if you're socially awkward or introverted, you fail this test right away). Now, not all companies' lunch interviews are this bad, but some just insist on one and do NOTHING to make the interviewee feel at home (maybe that's the whole point?).
Then there would be a separate 'culture fit' interview AFTER all the coding interviews, usually with the CTO/VP of Engineering/Director of Engineering. This would entail being either asked to rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 on specific tools/technologies, asked about how you deal with conflicts, how you disagree with others when you have to, what side projects you work on and so forth.
At some companies, a culture fit interview is an interview with non-technical folk, who'll ask you for the UMPTEENTH time why you want to work at this company, what are your hobbies, what do you do during your weekends/in your free time, what are your favorite bars, where do you hike/work out, what books you read, what artists you listen to yada yada.
Some companies also insist on the candidate grabbing drinks/breakfast with current employees. I've done a 'breakfast' interview where ALL the engineers were drunk to varying degrees (they'd just had a huge party the previous evening). Generally, this is again a way of seeing if the candidate is someone you'd like to grab drinks with, or would like to hang out with socially after work. Depending on the company, this might involve speaking about tech, or as often as not, not saying a word about the job and just treating it like an evening/morning with old friends.
It's hard to know what exactly to say, and one has to walk the tightrope between sounding and seeming confident and cool and NOT coming across as egoistic/too opinionated and obnoxious. A lot of times, the same answers garner different responses from different teams, and in general, I personally believe these kind of interviews/questions should be banned since it's really no indicator of skill. The people I enjoy hanging out with may not always be the people I want to work with 40 hours a week. Unfortunately, likability is a major factor that goes into the hiring decision.
" I personally believe these kind of interviews/questions should be banned since it's really no indicator of skill."
If it's between two people with the same skill level you obviously pick the person you can best see yourself working side by side with for the next years to come. There is nothing strange about this.
Be yourself and you will end up in a place where someone with your skills and personality will fit in
Ugh, this is acceptable, I guess, provided the company is willing to pay an hourly wage. I'm currently in the process of looking for a new gig, and there's nothing worse than being sent a coding challenge that should take about '2 hours' (4-5, more like), and then to get a canned rejection from the recruiter stating the code didn't pass muster. This is especially annoying with companies with DEEP pockets - at least do me the courtesy of paying an hourly wage OR have an engineer on the team go over the code and give some feedback.
I've also heard from certain of their _non_ high profile alums and they've spoken about feeling left out (because most of the others were hacking away in Python whereas she was a Ruby developer and felt isolated). Since then I take everything said and written about the Recurse Center with a grain of salt.