This was years ago and I don't know if the bar has slipped as coding bootcamps have gotten more popular, but the bar to entrance for my program seems pretty high in retrospect. None of the folks I knew and learned with there would I expect to go on into the corporate world and be one of those computer engineers who gets by in their career by doing hardly anything or being a net negative. They were to a man and woman very smart and voracious in their learning about programming best practices and languages. If you've got a person like that then does it really matter that they haven't been part of a real corporate project before? They will learn very quickly and likely be one of the most useful people on the team within a year. I'm not saying they should be made team lead without any experience but as a rank and file programmer, the salary is justified in that case, I believe.