Recurse Center

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.[1]

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.[2][3][4] 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.[5]

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.[6] In 2014 the retreat reached the "tipping point" of self-sufficiency purely from recruiting income.[7]

Internal costs to the company have been reported at "nearly $12,000" for each participant.[6]

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).[8] 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.[9]

In 2015 the organization changed its name to the Recurse Center to avoid confusion over these matters.[10]

Since its founding, the faculty have experimented continually with day-to-day experience in the retreat. Experiments have included:

• “facilitators” for day-to-day shepherding of participants and improvement of the organization itself,[11][12][13][14]

• a "residents" program for shorter-term specialist guidance,[15][16]

• Code Words, a journal about programming,[17][18]

• a “maintainers” program to promote contribution to open-source software projects[19]

• a research lab,[7][20][21]

• half-length batches,[22] and

• a mentoring program for new coders.[23]

The Center did not initially publish a code of conduct, but eventually formalized its expectations of participant behavior in June 2017.[24] Prior to that, it listed social rules intended to shepherd community behavior and “to remove as many distractions as possible so everyone can focus on programming.”[25]

These social rules are one of the retreat's most influential features and have been adopted by a number of other programming communities.[26][27][28][29][30][31]

There is a large community of alumni that have remained active past the end of their ”batch“, interacting with each other and with new participants in person or via virtual tools.[32]

The level of participants' skill and experience is diverse, in common with retreats in other creative fields and unlike many engineering organizations. Participants range from long-experienced software developers on sabbatical, to people who have been coding for only a few months, to retirees, to college students on vacation.[33] Some participants hold doctoral degrees; others have left school before completing secondary or even primary education. Many participants are engineers, but others have strong non-engineering backgrounds, in the Humanities, journalism, pure mathematics, the performing arts, among many others.

• Official website