u/michaelnovati replied ·
Hackbright has an extremely strong network that sticks together in the future and it has a lot of people that end up at top companies 3 to 5 years in the future.
Historically, Hackbright had a ton of support pre-acquisition. Many top companies, including Facebook, officially supported them by getting strong engineers to be mentors there.
Hackbright would then have these interview days where mentors could interview people to hire - and if they did hire, they had to pay like $20K or something as a fee (in addition to the feed the student paid Hackbright themselves). Problem was almost no one met the bar. Facebook hired a handful of people ever.
So a lot of the top companies dropped support and it wasn't worth the investment of time and cost - they could find good engineers elsewhere cheaper and faster.
Hackbright switched gears a bit and started to focus on apprenticeship partnerships as people were not entry level yet. They were in person in SF and a bunch of people ended up at Twilio, Pinterest, Twitter, etc... as apprentices in in person jobs.
After they were acquired they haven't changed much and the primary benefit is the network from over the years.
ADA Developers Academy has overtaken them as the top gender-focused program right (research more about them).