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Yes, we want people to be making an intentional choice to come to RC, and not just to do it because it's free, so we don't lead with that. Our hope is that people will get excited about the idea, and then be pleasantly surprised when they discover that it's completely free.

(While we don't like to lead with being free, we also don't mean to completely bury that fact -- e.g., we do have it on the front page, albeit at the very bottom. Perhaps we should make this a little more prominent. Thanks for the feedback!)

I love the "no backseat driving" rule. That kind of behaviour is what caused me to stop engaging with StackOverflow.

> I also wonder whether the roof rule was written preemptively or retrospectively -- I hope the former.

Presume you're referring to [1], not the page you linked, and one might be inclined to accuse you of __feigning surprise__ but if not: using the roof is a quite common expectation in mid-rise buildings in big cities like NY, though not usually in a building you don't yourself own/lease in.

1. https://www.recurse.com/code-of-conduct

I'm surprised by the "you are not allowed to be surprised, ever" rule. It puts me off of recurse entirely.

I shouldn't even need to explain why as it should be self-evident that policing/banning a completely natural and sometimes highly beneficial emotion/reaction is beyond problematic.

It seems like an XY problem - they implemented it to solve a genuine problem, without understanding the problem.

Like, the canonical example they give is

> Dan: What’s the command line?

> Carol: Wait, you’ve never used the command line?

Surely everyone can imagine at least two versions of Carol.

1. Condescending and dismissive. Indeed, that's not behaviour anyone should be tolerating.

2. Thrilled to be able to introduce someone to something new. She might follow that question up with "oh come on over here, let me show you! This will change your life." and proceed to try to teach terminal stuff. Isn't this the best sort of teacher, someone who is infectiously passionate about something?

Dan may still respond negatively to Carol2, but that's Dan's problem - he needs a therapist of some sort to address whatever insecurities he has.

Now, you might say "The rule is about FEIGNED surprise", which is Carol1. But it explicitly says

> When someone acts surprised when you don’t know something, it doesn’t matter whether they’re pretending to be surprised or actually surprised.

Then goes on to describe the version of Dan that needs therapy

> The effect is the same: the next time you have a question, you’re more likely to keep your mouth shut. An accurate name for this rule would be no acting surprised when someone doesn’t know something,

No, that's not how I or any other well-adjusted person would react.

A better name for the rule is "don't be a dick. Everyone is here to help each other learn and grow" (and there might be a separate rule/policy/resource about how people who have not yet learned how to positively and productively control their emotions - which I am not denigrating, simply pointing out reality - can seek assistance with that as well).

In the end, IT DEPENDS. But there's apparently no room for such nuance at Recurse...

How did you connect with people from hn and made irl friendships with them?

I wonder if they have a rule on using AI and what their general stance is there.

when I did my batch, almost everyone I met was scrappy. it was tinkerers, artists, hacker types, drawn by curiosity and the RC community. most had been laid off, were making a career change, or simply weirdos not on the usual ladder.

I got a cheap bedroom sublet through a former recurser and sublet my own place back home.

not your comment, but some replies below make it sound like RC would be otherwise, full of rich kids or "retreat" types maybe, but it's the opposite.

leaving work, paying NYC rent, yes it's all expensive but places like RC that create free spaces like this are part of the solution

I think it's more for folks who were making ~150k starting in 2012-2018. Most of them can afford to keep a place in new york and take a sabbatical.

It might have been more successful in a lower cost of living state.

https://www.recurse.com/virtual-rc

It's very far from the same thing, but there's Hacker Dojo in Mountain View if you're looking for people irl to meet up with.

By my read of the intended culture, it shouldn't really change anything within the RC experience itself. The "social rules" are such that enthusiasts and skeptics should be able to work side by side, and show each other things they can learn from. Just like with any other technology.

Edit: Looks like there was better discussion of this already (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956925).

Not OP, but I was an early employee at a startup that pivoted into this market. The short answer is that you need to do what large-scale enterprise customers want you to do (because that's where the money is). To do that, you need a predictable pipeline that delivers X applications for Y money. One way to achieve that is to get into managing traffic from the big job boards. What we did in the early days was figure out how we can optimize client's sourcing budget to get the most applicants.

We tried "Tinder for jobs" or some bs like that and just couldn't build business around that. Because in the end of the day, you'll end up building a platform that has to compete with Indeed and other established players.

At the time, the job market was quite different. But even now, I would assume it is very difficult to get good information to do this, similary as it is difficult to have people fill out accurate dating profiles. Both the company as well as applicants have at least a partial incentive to not be truthful, omit some things, or just write what they think they are like, as opposed to what it is really like.

Beats me what it's become, but OkCupid at the outset and probably still by 2010 was about estimating compatibility based on the results of quizzes taken by both parties. To improve results beyond OkCupid's built-in romantic personality types, you could submit your own quizzes or general questions, with results expected to get better the more questions in common both parties had answered. I don't completely remember, but I think you could even specify your own answer and an ideal match's answer separately.

To me, the problems here are reasonably obvious. It works well enough provided the applicant pools are sufficiently small and both parties are honest. Even then, the point of OkCupid or any other dating service is just to get people to meet. Whether they end up in any kind of multi-year contractual relationship akin to getting a job is going to be extremely rare. You'd have to ask them if they even tracked it, but 1 marriage in 10,000 90%+ matches wouldn't surprise me as even an upper bound. Jobs aren't quite as serious as marriage, but still more serious than agreeing to meet for drinks.

It's hard to see how you'd improve on the existing system of posting requisitions and applications. monster.com, indeed.com, whatever else has ever existed are seemingly already a dating service for jobs. Making it specifically "OkCupid for jobs" implies you have some kind of questionnaire-based compatibility estimator that is based on at least as much research as romantic compatibility, and I don't think that kind of research exists, and that the parties be at least as honest as those on OkCupid, which I also don't think will happen. I know the popular imagination is everyone lies on a dating service, but I don't think that's true. They exaggerate, but people will place in their search filters that they really do prefer a particular race, age range, socio-economic status, things that employers aren't legally allowed to admit to. That's aside from the principal/agent split in job requisitions that doesn't exist in dating. At least messaging someone on a dating service you can be reasonably well-assured the person who is claiming to know what they want is the person you'll be matching with. For a job, the requisitions are generic, not matched to a specific team or manager, so compatibility is even more spotty. A job seeker may be perfectly compatible with most teams in an organization, but still not appear to be with the organization itself, which usually expects to be able to move candidates between teams. Imagine a dating service where instead of having to convince a girl to go to prom with you, you have to instead match against her parents first, who have six daughters, might pair you with any of them, and base their own evaluations on a mix of what they believe is required and a stereotype of what they think teenage girls like.

The problems aren't as alike as they superficially appear.

> when's the last time you've seen a coworker brag about using vim

Are you suggesting these people have increased or decreased in quantity? I feel like I've met more vim/neovim/tmux/theprimagen/tool-rewritten-in-rust geeks with every new job.

I resemble that remark!

They offer recruiting services.

I respect your opinion and experience, but FWIW for the readers, I had the completely opposite experience.

The batch did divide into groups. Some people were learning functional programming, others focused on Transformers architecture, while yet others on dynamic programming. But I quickly found a small group of people who were building things that I was interested in, games and AI applications.

In the unstructured time I was able to set my own goals, ship a lot, write a lot, and give a lot of talks on topics that are very interesting to me.

I didn't expect or get any free food from the Recurse Centre -- I was in New York, I had the world's cuisines available to me. I often went on lunch along with other RC members to reasonably affordable places within walking distance.

RC is not a college course with exams and a fixed syllabus -- It was unstructured and self-directed -- and that's what made it so special.

New York is... New York. I've spent a lot of time there, and even lived there for a summer. I was at a board meeting down there recently and a new young ex officio member basically asked "How do people deal with the confusion?" It is what it is. And it used to be worse.

I'm not sure who you are, but I'm sorry that RC was a bad experience for you. I appreciate your sharing your experience so respectfully, and I hope you've since found other communities or opportunities that are better a better fit for you!

I know one or two other people who have similar feelings to you (bland experience, wish they had connected more with the people). That is why in my advice for people considering Recurse Center (https://jcmorrow.com/recurse/) I encourage people not to come in too attached to a project.

The competitors to Zulip are Slack and Discord, maybe Matrix/IRC. The question is how do you group subjects and sub-subjects aka threading and Zulip forces the user to pick both explicitly. This results in an easier to follow conversation. Eg in the 3d printing channel there's a modeling thread and a filament thread, so if you want to see stuff about filaments, you don't see the conversation about modeling unless you specifically go over to that thread. Meanwhile, Slack's threads are part of the channel, so you can go into a channel, post a message, and half the conversation is in the channel itself, and half the conversation is in a thread. So you're forced to read all of slack to keep up with the conversation. At the end of the day, it's about signal to noise, and Zulip's UX raises signal.

Everyone I’ve met personally who attended RC was insufferable. Condescending to the point they couldn’t disguise their contempt for people who they thought knew less. So extreme to the point they simply refused to learn from other people. One even literally bullied a teammate to tears.

The Recurse website has a page that describes the remote experience - https://www.recurse.com/virtual-rc

I've also attended RC remotely, so happy to answer any specific questions