Recurse Center
|
Type of site
|
Intentional community |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | New York, New York |
| Owner | 5blades, Inc. |
| Founder(s) | David Albert, Nick Bergson-Shilcock, Sonali Sridhar |
| Website | recurse.com |
| Commercial | yes |
| Launched | July 18, 2011 |
The Recurse Center (formerly known as Hacker School; also called RC) is an independent educational institution, combining a retreat for computer programmers with a recruiting agency. The retreat is an intentional community, a self-directed academic environment for programmers of all levels to improve their skills in, without charge. There is no curriculum and no particular programming languages or paradigms are institutionally favored; instead, participants work on open-source projects of their own choice, alone or collaboratively, as they see best. The Center has been an active advocate for women in programming.
The Center was initially founded in the Summer of 2010 as Hackruiter, an engineering recruiting company, using seed money from Y Combinator. The idea quickly arose of trying to transform recruiting for start-ups by running a retreat as part of the process, with the goal of helping clients become better programmers.
It officially opened its doors as “Hacker School” in New York in July, 2011, obliquely anticipating the coding bootcamp movement that arose in the mid-2010s. Hacker School came to wide public attention in mid-2012, when it partnered with the e-commerce company Etsy to offer “Hacker Grants” in support of female developers. A number of companies soon joined Etsy in funding these grants, and in 2014 the grant program expanded to offer support to other groups not well represented in American technology industries.
In 2015 Hacker School was renamed the Recurse Center.
The programming retreat is free of charge for admitted applicants to attend. The organization itself is for-profit and supports itself through recruitment, by placing some participants in programming jobs. In 2014 the retreat reached the "tipping point" of self-sufficiency purely from recruiting income.
Internal costs to the company have been reported at "nearly $12,000" for each participant.
The Center does not publish statistics on its admission rate, although there is no published rule against reapplication.
There is no curriculum; each participant imposes their own structure for self-directed learning on their stay at the Recurse Center, with guidance as requested. Despite its original name ”Hacker School“, the Recurse Center is not a school — its model of self-directed learning was inspired by the Unschooling philosophy of John Holt (1923–1985). Nor does it have any connection to the popular notion of a hacker as someone who breaks into computer systems — rather, “hacker” here was intended to suggest a programmer who is technically resourceful but also supportive of other programmers.
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