Some of my friends and family are eager (and IMO perfectly capable) to learn CS and enter the Software Engineering field, so I'm curious what would be a good way for them to do so (without spending 4 years on college again).
My general advice is to get some one to try https://www.theodinproject.com/ as it's free. If they try it for a bit and find they don't like it, no harm they can just stop. If they want to continue after a bit and still want to go a boot camp they're more likely to succeed at any of them.
Now we have a free trial (https://www.bloomtech.com/risk-free-trial) that everyone can try out for three weeks without even signing any documents.
A lot of people like the idea of making software engineering salaries, but don't particularly like building software. Then there are others that fall in love. We haven't found a great way to predict other than having people try it out.
I think you're talking about either the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR) [1], or Course Report [2] (both still up). CIRR is a body run by the code school industry itself to monitor its own results; Course Report has over 50k reviews by students as well as articles with tips about how to pick a code school, "top x code schools for y" lists, etc.
CIRR seems to be reasonably rigorous and honest. Their reports are easily available on the site. I've poked around in their reports, and there's a huge range of results, from less than 50% employment at 6 months to 80%+. There seems to be little to no correlation between the reputation of a given school and the actual outcomes (some of the most reputable schools had employment rates of 50%-60% at 6 months).
A big trend I noticed was that the schools with the highest employment rates were relatively low-profile schools teaching unsexy technologies that are low in SV buzz but nonetheless have high demand, like Java and C#.
For example, we used them for our first outcomes report and paid extra to have them "verify" our outcomes report, but they literally never opened the Google Drive file we sent them.
I think it was a great idea set up by well meaning people, but the self-governing aspect and comparisons created ended up in weird incentives that resulted in it falling apart.
The review sites are perhaps marginally better, but the positivity of reviews are almost 100% correlated with how hard schools work to farm for positive reviews, and their business model is selling leads to the schools, so the incentive isn't for objectivity there either.
Honestly the best way, though it requires more work, is to find a handful of recent grads on LinkedIn and ask them about their experience.
The stats on the CIRR site across schools did always seem a little... odd to me, with differences in outcomes too big to believe at times. Sounds like I would have found the same thing if I looked at any individual school over time, as the rules and practices changed.
I would recommend that if your friends are serious about getting into coding, ask them to take a few React basics courses (just go by the most popular ones on Udemy).
I found that overloading beginners with theory doesn't really work. Getting them to build something and figure out the why of it works better - at least that was my experience. I learned about, say, json webtokens way before I used them, but it wasn't until I built an app of my own with account authentication feature that I figured out what JWTs actually were.
A lot can also change in a year, so take this with a grain of salt.
It's a self-paced online curriculum that generally takes 1.5 - 2 years to get through, with an optional 4-month "Capstone" intensive after graduating the core curriculum. Progressing out of each course in the curriculum involves having to pass rigorous, easily failable, assessments; you just can't progress until you've cleared a pretty high bar of knowledge in each domain. There is a good mix of live interview assessments, written assessments, and coding projects.
The job placement statistics are staggering in comparison to the 'quicker' options -- as they should be given the time investment involved. I'm unaware of any institution that has had more success in placing students in high-quality software development positions.
Disclosure: I've been studying for about 14 months now using the Launch School curriculum.
There are no shortcuts unless you’re self-motivated/have a knack and can use online resources to learn (of which there are many).