For what it's worth I still think the name is great. The meaning of words change. The identity of Hacker School is strong, and I could easily see it deciding what hacker and school means in the future, not unlike YC and the words hacker and incubator. Granted, it's an uphill battle, but the name recognition is strong, unlike Foo Bootcamp (I might be biased in this regard, but friends have remembered the name without being prompting just because it sounds cool).
The linked book (Unlocking the Clubhouse[1]) is based off a multi-year study of Carnegie Mellon CS majors. They found it was common for the male CS majors to describe themselves as "in love" with programming but much less common for female CS majors to do so.
(That's obviously greatly simplified, but that's the gist of it.)
It would be even better if this was about more than gender. I am not one of the gender inequity deniers in this industry and I don't see anything wrong with valuing a better gender balance in the industry, in fact I think it's a good thing.
But love is such a loaded, unclear term. Why is it not good enough for someone to enjoy programming and have an intellectual curiosity about programming? To me that sounds like perfectly reasonable criteria to identify people who are a good fit for 3 months focused on programming. But you're basically saying that if it weren't for this gender inequity it would be totally reasonable to continue searching for a love of programming. It's hard enough for me to say I love my family and yet it was thought of as a good requirement to expect people to love programming to be qualified to participate in 3 months of programming in a community environment?
As the post mentions, we stopped using the word "love" for both reasons -- gender was part of but not the entire reason we switched.
In fact, the alum we quote as an example of the trouble with the word love is male:
We used to say applicants must "love" programming, but we've learned that was a mistake. While it sounds good, it doesn't actually describe what we care about, and it was dissuading qualified people from applying.
In fact, many of our best students have said they almost didn't apply because they worried they didn't love programming enough. Hacker School alum David Peter expressed this fear perfectly:
One of the questions in the interview was, "Do you love programming?"
I said yes, because I loved it more than most people I knew.
But was it love? I enjoyed writing and drawing equally, if not more.
After Hacker School, I'm revisiting these hobbies. Programming wasn't my first love."*
> Why is it not good enough for someone to enjoy programming and have an intellectual curiosity about programming?
For me, it's not so much programming, but the power it gives me. The capabilities that programming gives me. I can sure talk about static vs dynamic typing, but I'm going back again to things like power.
Programming the same thing over and over again sounds kind of boring, but making something new sounds grand!
Following up on something I said further down in this thread, I think the OP meant to use "gendered" in a gender studies sense and not in a linguistic sense. I don't fully understand the meaning of "gendered" in the gender studies sense, but I think the OP meant something like "systematically associated with gender in some way".
I think the intended meaning is basically that there are cultural differences around whether people tend to express their enthusiasm for programming as "love" or not, and so Hacker School now doubts this term is the best indicator of whether a prospective participant has the kind of enthusiasm they're looking for.
It's true that "gendered word" has a totally separate meaning in linguistics, where it refers to the phenomenon where a noun attracts or requires agreement according to a class that the noun is in. In many languages these words need not refer to animate beings' gender at all, and in some languages the noun classes are totally abstract and unrelated to masculinity or femininity, although there's some disagreement about this terminology.
Anyway, I suggest reading the OP as saying "cultural differences, often along gender lines, in whether people commonly describe their relationship with programming as love".
I wouldn't call the word itself gendered. The problem is it appeals disproportionately to men (for a variety of cultural reasons described in the study).
It's not in Hacker School's interest to skew their appeal toward certain groups of people for no reason.
Personally i'm much more concerned with why "i love programming" appeals more to one gender than another, and would prefer to see the cause of the problem tackled first. Abandoning the wording removes any need to have a conversation about things like gender-leaning language in the first place, further burying the issue.
It suggests (but certainly does not, as described, certainly establish) that the associating the term with a particular kind of affection for a vocation may be tied to gender, and therefore that suggesting that identifying with the use of that term in that relation as a qualification for a program like Hacker School may be an unintentional gender filter.
Interestingly, I'd never thought about that previously but as soon as I saw a reference to it I realized that I'd much less frequently seen women use the term in that context (with regard to vocational activities) compared to men, so, while I don't know that different word usage by gender is really the issue, I see that it certainly could be, and that it makes sense to avoid that usage in the context Hacker School was using it.
I am not surprised at all a study found that less women say they "love" programming. In my career I have worked with many women, and none of them would I consider less than well-rounded as a person. But I have met many, many males who are heavily skewed toward the "hacking is life" mindset. Nevertheless, the two best programmers I have ever known are women, and they did not identify as "hackers."
Hacking is a culture, not a job description, and in my experience, singleminded dedication to programming is not an indicator of ability. So I guess the real problem with "Hacker School" is that it's a programming school not a hacker school. A hacker (programming) school could never say anything like "you don't have to love programming" because being a hacker is pretty much defined by loving it.
I know women, programmers, who are in love with programming. Hell they're more in love with programming even maybe than I am. We have wonderful arguments about SOLID, and CQRS and event-sourcing and queues, and pipes, and job servers.
Loving your job isn't exclusive to men.
Anti-sexism is reaching a different type of extreme, where certainly we should be hiring women who don't love their job, just so we're not sexist?
I know where to draw the line. And I'm drawing it before that.
What you're saying is essentially that women should be discriminated against simply because they don't use the same phrasing as you. You're arrogantly demanding that they change the way they see the world simply because you don't like it. A person who doesn't say they "love" their job can still be as dedicated and passionate about it as you are -- they just put it in different terms. If a particular group of people is more likely to use different terms, then to discriminate against their terminology is to discriminate against that group. I'm sorry you can't stand that other people don't "love" their job, but why is it any of your business? If they do the job well and are comfortable doing it, then there is no reason to discriminate against them.
> I know women, programmers, who are in love with programming. Hell they're more in love with programming even maybe than I am.
Two things:
1) "I know people" is anecdote, it doesn't say anything about broad social trend.
2) The issue isn't whether women are as likely to share the feeling men call "love" toward programming, its whether women who have that feeling are as likely to call it "love".
"Results showed that women (but not men) exposed to cues related to romantic goals reported less positive attitudes toward STEM and less preference for majoring in math or science fields compared to other disciplines. This did not occur when they were exposed to cues associated with intelligence goals or friendship goals...
Park says, "When the goal to be romantically desirable is activated, even by subtle situational cues, women report less interest in math and science. One reason why this might be is that pursuing intelligence goals in masculine fields, such as STEM, conflicts with pursuing romantic goals associated with traditional romantic scripts and gender norms."
Park notes that women, in particular, are socialized from a young age to be romantically desirable, and that traditional romantic scripts in Western cultures are highly gendered, prescribing how men and women ought to think, feel and behave in romantic settings."
To explain very quickly and generally - a lot of men in CS (and probably in general) tend towards overconfidence, where women with the same skills will be underconfident in themselves. When you're surrounded by people who are ultra confident and professing their love for the subject matter, it's easy to feel that you don't love the topic as much as the people around you, and that you must not be as into it as everyone else. Probably best to read the referenced materials if you need to see these things quantified, and there's likely also other aspects that I'm missing, but that's the gist of it.
it's not, unless you're speaking spanish or any language that has genders for nouns.
verbs can't have genders, and frankly i'm insulted that someone would take the verb "love" and make it either feminine or masculine. "love" is human and genderless. is "eat" gendered because men typically eat more than women? no, because that would be ridiculous. no gender can lay claim to any verb unless it is created specifically for that gender, and even then i can't really think of any example (maybe "impregnate"? but even that is based on sex and not gender and has other meanings besides human procreation).
The original post is using "gendered" in a non-linguistic sense (with a meaning something like '[disproportionately] associated with a particular gender'). There are definitely adjectives and nouns that have such a strong gender connotation that they're used almost exclusively to refer to people of one gender, even though gender isn't necessarily part of their definition. (Common examples in English are "feisty", "perky", "bitchy", and "voluptuous", although there are others.) It seems quite possible to imagine verbs entering this category, so that they'd be used in practice almost exclusively with subjects of one gender, though I don't know of an example in English.
I think the original post's use of "gendered" is actually weaker than this phenomenon because it says that "love (one's activity or profession)" is used much more by men than by women, not necessarily that it's acquired a connotation for listeners that the subject is male. (So the Hacker School administrators' concern is that women tend not to describe themselves as "loving programming", not that a listener hearing that "X loves programming" will assume that X is a man.) I guess I just mean to suggest that it's quite possible to imagine a verb also acquiring such a connotation for listeners, even if this one hasn't in this case.
Getting back to the linguistic question of whether verbs can have gender, I think that duco in the sense of 'take (a wife)' in Latin can only be applied to a man's act of marrying a woman, and not to a woman's act of marrying a man, but that might be more a matter of ancient Roman legal understanding of marriage and so could be closer to your example of "impregnate" than to the original post's sense, which is meant to refer more to connotations than to grammatical possibility or impossibility.
There actually are languages that have genders for verbs, where gender is a feature for which verbs are inflected and where verbs must agree with their subject in gender as well as, say, number. For instance, in Hebrew if a male subject loves something, the verb form is אוֹהֵב ohev, whereas when a female subject loves something, the verb form is אוֹהֵבֵת ohevet. Arabic also has gender-marked verb forms that agree with the grammatical gender of the subject. This has no connection to the way the original post uses the term, though!
We shouldn't have named our company "Hacker School."
Both parts of our name have caused us trouble: Hacker
because so many people take it to mean a person who
breaks into computers rather than a clever programmer.
Why would that matter? Everyone who's interested in Hacker School is a hacker and understands the true meaning of the word.
That was initially our assumption, but we've learned that there are some people who are interested in (and ultimately great fits for) Hacker School who don't primarily interpret the word as we do.
Also, while most people who come to Hacker School understand our use of hacker, many of their families and friends don't. And that's caused Hacker Schoolers a surprising amount of annoyance ("What do you mean you're quitting your job and moving to New York for Hacker School?!")
Sorry for the late reply, I was temperately banned after my comment got downvoted twice.
> Also, while most people who come to Hacker School understand our use of hacker, many of their families and friends don't. And that's caused Hacker Schoolers a surprising amount of annoyance ("What do you mean you're quitting your job and moving to New York for Hacker School?!")
That's a really great point, I hadn't though of that. I'm still glad you chose that name though, if you hadn't I probably wouldn't have been interested enough to read through your website and ultimately decide to apply in the future.
If you were to re-make Hacker School with the knowledge you have now, what would you name it?
> Why would that matter? Everyone who's interested in Hacker School is a hacker and understands the true meaning of the word.
No, not everyone who is a hacker (in the clever programmer sense) understands the word primarily in that sense. And, furthermore, not everyone who would be interested in what Hacker School offers is already a hacker (in the sense at issue), though presumably going to Hacker School would make it more likely that they would be.
We're also updating our internal review system to obfuscate applicants' names to avoid any subconscious bias during our application review process. We'll soon be considering applicants named "Blue Dart" and "Purple Rover" rather than "Jane Doe" and "José Smith".
Careful. I am reminded of a classic hacker koan (perhaps, appropriately for a hacker school):
I'm glad I got to read this post since I recently didn't get into HS for this summer.
I don't think I'm worried that they may have made a mistake with my application because I'm worth the time, or other self affirming points (blah blah blah). Although, it would have been nice if they mentioned what exactly made them feel like I wasn't a good fit so I could work on that. I get that it's not always possible since they probably get a huge number of applications to go through.
It seems like they do a lot of introspection which I like to see - gives you a sense of what kind of people they are and makes me want to go there even more.
Thanks for the kind words, and I'm sorry things didn't work out this time around :\
Regarding feedback: We tried to give individualized feedback up until last year, but we stopped doing it because it took a ton of time and wasn't particularly effective. We wrote about this here: https://www.hackerschool.com/feedback
I disagree with one "but" in this post. Rebranding is not optional/too expensive. It's THAT important. Don't not do it, and never give up on a necessary TODO. Good luck! You guys are doing great.
All told they've been around since 2011. If they think three years is too late to change brands, well, it just sounds pretty shortsighted to me. They can take their existing customers with them and build much needed credibility in being true to their vision. As long as the new brand is better than the old brand I don't see a downside.
