[guessmyname]

I attended a Recurse Center batch, and while I understand that others had amazing experiences, mine was quite bland.

I can't blame anyone but myself for this.

Most of the other attendees were intelligent or highly self-motivated, or both. Many people seemed to connect instantly, forming small work groups, sharing project ideas, and even going out for lunch or dinner together. They were constantly talking about how awesome Zulip was (is?) [*] and engaged in a constant stick-measuring contest to see whose weekly project would make it to Hacker News’ top 30. At times, it felt like I had joined some sort of mini-cult. I know it wasn’t like that at all; it was just the visuals from an outsider in a completely different culture. As far as I can remember, people were very friendly, willing to help others whenever they were stuck, and happy to study and tackle challenging problems together. There were lots of learnings floating around the working space. Sadly, it didn’t work for me at all, and years later, I still don’t know why exactly.

Perhaps it was the fast pace of New York City and SoHo itself? Or the rudeness of passersby, especially the police officers who couldn’t be bothered even if I just wanted to ask for directions? Or the dirtiness of the streets? The constant noise from cars honking all the time? The strange people in the Subway? The ubiquitous unhealthy food at every corner? Healthy food was difficult to find, at least for someone new to the city, and when accessible, it was unaffordable. Multiple times, I found myself working in the Recurse Center workspace with an empty stomach, which obviously exacerbated the bad experiences, but I can’t even complain about that because they often had free pizza (once, twice a week?) but obviously, pizza is unhealthy, so I never accepted.

Overall, I had a very bad experience, but I believe nothing was Recurse Center’s fault; it was mine. I’m not entirely sure what I expected when I joined, but I hope this serves as a warning to future attendees to prepare themselves before joining, especially if you are not familiar with American culture, and particularly with New York.

[*] https://zulip.com (years later, I still don’t understand why people love Zulip so much)

[namanyayg]

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.

[ghaff]

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.

[nicholasjbs]

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!

[jcmorrow]

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.

[fragmede]

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.

[mnky9800n]

I never thought about it this way but this is true. But why can’t you delete things?

[kaikai]

I loved my time at recurse and also had some similar experiences to you. There were cliques and social dynamics that I didn’t fully understand or didn’t want to be involved in, but that’s genuinely normal for me. I’ll go out on a limb and say that’s normal for many people in the tech industry. There were also people genuinely interested in making connections and drawing others into groups, and I haven’t experienced that in other tech spaces.

New York was overwhelming and different than my usual life, and sometimes that felt amazing and sometimes it was hard. Knowing that it was temporary let me enjoy the good parts and not worry too much about the hard parts.

I hate zulip and find it incredibly unintuitive. It’s a real shame to me that it’s the best way to engage with the recurse community, because once my batch was over I haven’t been as involved.

A lot of the program is what you make of it- it’s self directed, and you won’t magically become a different person just by walking through the doors. I do really appreciate all the work that the recurse team puts into setting people up for success, both through the interview process and the light structure they provide.

[golly_ned]

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.

[zahlman]

That sounds like the opposite of what they expect from each other…