[stmchn]

Yeah, I had the same thing happen to me. It was really disappointing not to get in. The email said not to take it personally and that they try to find the best fit but it's hard not to take it personally and wonder why they didn't find you fit enough for Hacker School. I'm sure they have good reasons though.

[nicholasjbs]

I'm sorry, that must be an incredibly frustrating experience. We get back to people when we can with specific feedback, but we definitely don't get back to everyone who requests it. As Dave mentioned elsewhere in the thread, we're trying to do better at laying out what we look for, though I imagine that's little consolation.

Admissions are undoubtedly one the hardest, least enjoyable, and most psychologically exhausting parts of running Hacker School. We do our best to get it right, but we have to make decisions on a relatively small amount of information (a written application and/or one or two ~15 minute interviews), and we know we sometimes get it wrong. To make matters worse, the stakes are high (it's virtually impossible to fix a bad decision), and we have to do the process hundreds of times, so even if we're right 90% of the time, we're still wrong a lot.