For the record, I took a bootcamp over doing a master's in CS: the clincher for such a decision came when an engineer friend at a tech unicorn said he'd take a smart bootcamper over a regular CS grad on the basis that from hiring experiences:
- you don't use most of the stuff you learn from CS at work (when was the last time you proved root two was irrational, or used red-black trees on the job?)
- a bootcamper will write cleaner code and is less likely to have some of the stereotypical traits engineers are prone to having (e.g. takes feedback badly/doesn't communicate well/takes feedback badly) he attributes this to the more diverse pool of people boot camps attract
To be frank, I think the aversion to bootcampers primarily stems from individuals' need to validate their own life choices thinking things like "I studied CS for four years to become a Software Engineer so how could someone come close to playing catch up in 3 months!?"
But really this style of thought is flawed - people underestimate the fundamental value of doing a degree, which teaches you way more than just knowledge. Think how much less developed you were intellectually coming out of high school than post college.
With that said, it's also probably true that there are plenty of bootcamp graduates out there with an inflated sense of worth and companies that have hired/rejected poor bootcampers and now have a set opinion about bootcamps.
To these people it's worth noting that bootcamps have only been around for a couple of years, and as is the case in any good startups, the product improves as the companies grow and mature and have time to iteratively improve it.
Graduates from a bootcamp today are probably of appreciably higher quality than they were back then.