Redesigning the Recurse Center application to inspire curious programmers

Redesigning the Recurse Center application to inspire curious programmers

When we began rewriting the RC application earlier this year, I was very much inspired by one of the best question sets I’ve come across: the Oxford All Souls Examination papers. They give a choice of one or two questions from a few lists of many fascinating rabbit-hole-openers, which range from abstract philosophical problems (“What is life?”) to open-ended thought experiments (“Should anonymous posting online be forbidden?”) to more practical future-oriented questions (“Is style the last refuge against AI?”).

Changing our application was a little scary, because it didn’t feel terrifically broken. We’ve read many thousands of applications from people wanting to attend RC over the years, and have admitted many thousands of wonderful Recursers off of them. Doing application review is one of my favorite parts of working here: we do it as a group for about an hour each week, and we are often so charmed by the answers to some of our questions that we share them or save them.

This wasn’t due to our application being exceptionally good. The applications we get are interesting because our applicants tend to be very curious and self-directed people whose thought processes, projects, and plans we find exciting and inspiring, and the application highlighted those qualities.

But we thought our application could do a much better job of inspiring people, giving them a sense of what RC is like, and giving us better signals that more directly connect to how Recursers succeed at RC. So we’ve redesigned our application and its questions.

Better questions

We’ve added a new set of questions, from which you’ll choose two to answer. We hope these are fun to ponder; they’re akin to things you might think and talk about at RC. We asked our alums to help come up with these:

• Tell the story of the weirdest bug you’ve ever fixed.
• Do you think code is more like math, or more like literature?
• What’s the ugliest code you’ve ever written? What do you like about it?
• Pick something that you feel is often described in a complex way. Explain it simply.
• What’s something you’d be excited to debate over lunch with other Recursers?
• What’s the last deep dive you went on?
• “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” Discuss.

We also added the question “What programming project (or fix, or contribution) are you proudest of?” to give you an opportunity to talk about your work more qualitatively.

Thoughts on designing a good application

If you want to hire (or admit!) people who are curious and self-directed, you can probably be using your application process to filter and excite people more than you are now.

We have some tips for how to do this that hopefully apply to anyone who’s hiring:

• Have a clear rubric for evaluating candidates that is shared internally and externally.
• Applications should be exciting for the reviewer and the applicant. If you’re bored reading the answers, you’re probably not intellectually engaging the people you’re hoping will apply.
• Interesting applications are a positive signal in and of themselves to curious people that you care enough to have an application that’s thoughtful.
• Applications should give people the opportunity to demonstrate whether they’ll be a good fit just as much as interviews.
• Don’t make your application too long! For your sake, and the applicants’.
• If you don’t want people pasting in generated answers from an LLM, ask an LLM to fill out your application to get a sense for what those kinds of responses look like so you can more easily catch them.