Looking into the article, they don't start from zero:
It helps that Hackbright students usually aren’t starting from scratch, but have instead developed their initial skills using Codecademy or by attending development workshops. After all, Phillips said, Hackbright is for people who are serious about programming as a profession, and you can’t decide that you’re serious until you’ve tried it out.
So as I see it's for somebody who knows some basic programming but wants to get some skills that would get her hired.
I think you would be surprised to know what level I started at. Everything I had learned about backend development was passed up within two or three days, and that Friday we went over HTML and CSS, which passed up everything I knew about that. Hackbright is, of course, no easy road. In fact, I can easily say it was harder than all of my AP courses in high school, harder than moving to a German city where I knew no one, harder than deciding to jump into the marriage boat (trust me, that was difficult), and harder than even the decision to make such an investment. And that's why it's worth it. Of course we'll all continue learning, just as every programmer does, but Hackbright was a fabulous kick in the right direction.
She has a physics degree from Duke, and back when we were freshmen together, was considering majoring in CS, among other technical majors. I'm not sure how representative she is of the batch, but for people with existing technical skills/background, 10 weeks of focused coding practice + feedback could be a pretty big help.
It helps that Hackbright students usually aren’t starting from scratch, but have instead developed their initial skills using Codecademy or by attending development workshops. After all, Phillips said, Hackbright is for people who are serious about programming as a profession, and you can’t decide that you’re serious until you’ve tried it out.
So as I see it's for somebody who knows some basic programming but wants to get some skills that would get her hired.