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I see a lot of people here are looking backward to the horse-and-buggy days. Looking forward, things will be quite different, as we are entering the era of Conscious Capitalism. That would be the new enterprise of John Mackey after selling Whole Foods.Its credo is, in part (see online for the rest).We believe that business is good because it creates value, it is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange, it is noble because it can elevate our existence, and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity. Free enterprise capitalism is the most powerful system for social cooperation and human progress ever conceived. It is one of the most compelling ideas we humans have ever had. But we can aspire to even more.But I’m not talking about a single effort, I’m talking about a whole new wave. For one thing, Conscious Capitalism already has more than 1500 firms aligned with them. For another, my wife and I a few years ago spent three days at Watson Institute in Boulder, a college for training social entrepreneurs about the ins and outs of fund raising, organization, staffing, managing and so on.We went to classes with some forty students selected on the basis of their business plan. Their year or two at Watson are spent fleshing out their plans, learning from leading not-for-profit gurus (check out the Mentors and Past Teachers pages). The plans were solid and bold—affordable eye care in the Third World, AI for locating suicidal and depressed youths, free sanitary products for girls in Africa and India so that don’t have to drop out of school when they get their periods, and on and on. Just click on the pix in the Current Students and Alumni sections to get an idea of the wide array of creative projects.Among the things students learn are the relative merits of the many new capitalistic forms available to them—triple bottom line, creating shared value, creative capitalism and B corporations in addition to the many forms of business available in traditional for-profit and not-for-profit capitalism. It’s truly a revolution. And Watson now has several copycats.But will the revolution succeed?You betcha! Where governmental programs necessarily take from the economy, these ways of going about meeting basic needs actually help build the economy. For a country as mired in debt as we have become, that’s a significant advantage. Some others:Capitalism is uniquely able to satisfy market needs even before the market is aware of those needs. Government provision of aid is always reactionary.Aid dispensed from a bureaucracy is one-size-fits-all. Capitalism can custom-tailor plans to meet individual needs in most cases.There is no compassion in working with a bureaucracy; indeed, recipients are often made to feel small or demeaned. Free market approaches, by contrast, are all about serving customer needs.Government programs almost never die; they often long outlive the need. Free-market approaches tend to disappear when the need is satisfied.Free-market approaches have a much easier time ramping up or down to meet fluctuating needs.With free enterprise, it’s much easier to provide a suite of services from one source or composite services, such as, food and help landing a job or lodging plus a free clinic.It was none other than Karl Marx who pointed out (in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme) that provision of aid under state auspices could never bring about a class-free society; rather it would inevitably result in a permanent dictatorship of a bourgeois elite using pauperism (state-provided aid) to maintain an underclass in order to perpetuate their rule. Some of us can see that is exactly what is going on; others, not so much.Not only will private provision of aid eliminate that issue, it will greatly increase tax revenues while lowering tax consumption—exactly the kinds of solutions we need in our present debt crisis. It will be a Win all around!Half a dozen years back, I interviewed a number of physicians (mostly med-school professors) for a book. Based on a story one told me about a fortuitous, free outcome at a Mexican free clinic he took several students to, I began asking those physicians whether it would be possible to create low-cost/no-cost clinics in under-served communities that actually paid patients to come regularly. We brainstormed ways of accomplishing just that, and all three concluded it would be possible, except… in one form or another, all three said the same thing, “Do you realize how many laws would have to be changed for that to be possible?”We really, really need to get government out of the helping-people business.

There were two ways actually. The first is good old fashion navigation. Navigation was a large portion of ground school education all pilots and especially Navy pilots went through before they ever set foot in an airplane. In the pre-flight briefing pilots were given a position where they could expect their carrier to be on the return flight. The pilots would use their compass and watch to compute where they were at any point along their flight path. Assuming their calculations were correct, they could then plot a path back to where the carrier’s expected position. This process is called Dead reckoning.Unfortunately, any number of factors could undo these calculations including compass errors, unexpected wind variations, atmospheric conditions, disorientation from battle, and pilot fatigue or injury. The most frightening for the pilots was that circumstances of the battle forced their carrier to move to a different location than the briefing indicated. So a pilot could perform the calculations perfectly with perfectly functioning instruments to only find empty ocean when he returned to the location the carrier.To account for this all three of the carrier equipped navies had a form of radio navigation aids on board there ships to aid their pilots in finding the home base. In the US Navy this was the YE-ZB which the pilots referred to as “Zed Baker”. This systems was not nearly as reliable as the pilots would like it to be but still did save quite a few lost pilots. It broadcasted in the UHF band which meant it was dependent on line of sight. So if the pilot had made a large error or the carrier had made a significant move during the battle, the pilot may or may not be able to pick up the signal depending largely on his altitude.As a student of WWII, I have read numerous accounts where planes simply failed to return even on non-combat missions. The ocean is vast and many pilots simply disappeared into the void never to be heard from again. The combat certainly was brutal but Navy pilots’ every day lives was frightening when you study it in depth/

(I'm a cofounder at Hack Reactor.)Our programs are very similar in most ways, and we share a common mission. You can't really go wrong here. Still, I'll answer in some depth, since I get asked this question often, and I'm looking forward to responding with this link.An edit, much laterThis post is now quite old, but I see a steady stream of upvotes that tell me that people are still reading. The news since then:Our big bet on JavaScript has paid off, and it is now a generally-accepted fact in the industry that JavaScript developers have a brighter future than Rails developers. The Rails bootcamps, including Dev Bootcamp, are gradually shifting focus to JavaScript, but they are now trailing the industry in SF. (Demand for Rails devs is still growing outside of tech hubs, where trends take a while to catch up.)Our curriculum was selected by Udacity to power their Web Development microdegree.Our student outcomes have consistently led our industry, even as 100 other schools got started in the same market that used to just include Dev Bootcamp, Hack Reactor, and a few friends.We continue to invest more staff resources in job search support and alumni programs than any other bootcamp.Dev Bootcamp is a great school, and their students rave about it. In one sense, this is like arguing whether Paris is better than Madrid, but in another sense, this is a settled question: Hack Reactor leads the sector in many concrete respects.The original postIn the interest of brevity I'll do my best to only state things about HR that aren't true of DBC (afaik -- corrections welcome).Hiring stats100% of our graduates are now working as software engineers, at an average salary of $85,000. Edit, several months later: those numbers are now 98% and, for the most recent class, $110,000. They work at companies that turn away college students every day, like Groupon and Salesforce, and at small, revolutionary startups like Lovely. They are among the first full-time Meteor engineers. No other coding academy claims to exceed these outcomes.Way more hoursHere's the naive calculation:12 weeks * 6 days/week * 11 hours/day = 792 hours9 weeks * 5 days/week * 8 hours/day = 360 hoursNow, it's definitely true that you can stay as late as you want at Hack Reactor or at DevBootcamp, so your experience won't play out like the above math. However, these hours have many material effects on your world. During these hours:Staff are there to help.Prepared curriculum keeps you on an optimal learning path.Every student is present, collaborating with their project partners and contributing to the motivation of their peers.My biggest reason for advocating for these hours is the least intuitive, and the one I have the hardest time explaining to applicants. I'll give it a shot here anyway:Classes move at the pace of the slowest student, and when someone punches out at 5, it affects everyone.Our long hours are an unusual choice, and one that turns off many potential students. We're pleased about that!Quality of InstructorsOur founders are software engineers from Google, Twitter, OkCupid, and we hired our instructors away from Adobe, Mozilla, and elsewhere. They're all phenomenal teachers, and very passionate about it. There's no comparable teaching force that I'm aware of.Technical abilities of incoming studentsWe do rigorous technical interviews, including assigning applicants an actual web application as a take-home project. (We welcome applications from students with no programming experience, but in these cases the admissions process involves supporting them through the first ~30 hours of learning to code.)When we accept a student, they're already quite familiar with the basics of programming. Our pre-course curriculum covers pretty much all the material that you can profitably cover on your own: the command line, git, and many JS tools (jQuery, Backbone, Node).About a third of our most recent class had previously worked professionally as a developer.JS vs Ruby/Rails: conceptual sizeRuby (and its community) has emphasized productivity and attractiveness over conceptually small, well-understood code. This is a very smart decision for experienced developers, but does not make for a great educational environment. Javascript (again, as a language and a community) is focused on composing smaller pieces into larger, well-understood programs.Rails is an outcome of (and a contributor to) this aspect of Ruby. It's a great piece of software, but it's not a conducive place to learn about how code works. Rails devs don't, in general, have any clue who instantiates their classes, or what a bare HTTP request looks like, and they are not expected to learn. This isn't true of Node or Backbone developers. It's an important fact when you're trying to teach software engineering and how the web works.The Ruby/Rails focus on making very slick, usable tools has led to another undesirable outcome for students: there are a vast number of toolbox niceties that aid the experienced practitioner, but are a dangerous distraction for the beginner. I don't want my students to muck up their head with the many potential invocations of url_for[1], but a) that's what the reference material recommends and b) inconsequential details like that are part of how Rails engineers are evaluated by hiring companies (for better or for worse).JS vs Ruby/Rails: a brighter futureWhile Ruby and Rails are growing, Javascript is the center of an exciting revolution in the way that applications are developed. Bear with me through some background:Until the advent of Gmail and Google Maps, the web was built around the client-server model, in which servers generated pages of HTML and browsers (called "clients") showed them to users. When the user wanted to interact with the site, they'd click on something, their browser would throw away the page they were looking at, and the server would send them a new one.Gmail and Google Maps were the first "rich client apps" -- applications where the HTML was generated in the browser, by Javascript (the only language that runs in the browser), using data gathered in the background from servers. This architectural style offers interactivity features that aren't possible in the old model, and as such, most of the applications you interact with daily are now built in this manner (or transitioning to it). We're in a very exciting era, and we have an opportunity to educate the first native speakers of this new paradigm. Meanwhile, Rails is increasingly being relegated to the API layer, and it offers very little support and structure for those hoping to build rich client apps.More individual attentionWe, the staff, are phenomenally dedicated to our students. Our hours are our public-facing evidence of this, but our students are more affected by the following:We conduct individual code reviews (via github pull requests) for every student for all assessements and practice problems.We hold hiring day before the program ends, so that we have time to work one-on-one with students and provide intensive, deep coaching for success in their job search.During the beginning weeks of the program, about a quarter of your in-class hours are instructional. This means we are actually giving lecture material and guidance, rather than just giving you space to learn the material on your own.Higher tuitionEarly on, when we were making tough decisions, we used one fact as a compass by which to navigate: this program forms the basis of our students' new careers and lives, and its impact goes far beyond its apparent limited scope. This led to every one of the above facets of our program. It also led us to decide not to economize. We've set a very high price point in order to provide the resources that will set our students up for years and years of reverberating successes.(We have a deferral program for exceptional students that are unable to otherwise attend for financial reasons.)---------------I haven't even touched on stuff like amenities (24/7 hot coffee), visiting luminaries (the authors of Meteor, and Uber's dispatch system), the deep focus on best practices (git + pull requests from day one, TDD from day two, etc), and so on, but -- yknow -- time to go help the students :)[1] It turns out that there are five different methods named url_for in rails 3.2.8. url_for (ActionController::Base) - APIdock