[rauljara]

"But I really felt like I was treated terribly as an applicant, and the facilitators came off as having a high regard for themselves and engineering arrogance rather than being interested in helping people and being constructive."

I attended Hacker School Winter 2013. No community is perfect, of course, and it sucks that you felt you were treated that way. But my experience in and out of hacker school is that it is about the least arrogant community of hackers ever. It explicitly discourages the sort of "dickwaving" you're complaining about, and the group does a good job of pushing aside arrogance by being nice, encouraging, and enthusiastic. All those good behaviors just come out more naturally when you're surrounded by other people exhibiting them, and in my experience the facilitators totally lead the way on that.

Which is not to say you didn't have a crappy experience, because everyone has bad days. And it's not to say there's zero arrogance at hacker school because, well... programmers. But in general, I think it is a super helpful and constructive place.