Feds hit coding boot camp with big fine for allegedly conning students

Sans the boot camp, you're describing many self-taught developers, myself included.

I was motivated to learn to code, and used the resources available — library, school computers, etc. — when a job turned me down because I know 8502 assembly but not 8086 assembly, I bought myself a cheap second hand, green screen PC and found a shareware assembler.

The critical part was finding that first employer that would hire me with an unrelated degree, because that served as my apprenticeship.

With one job on your resumé, the next is much easier

Luck, via an acquisition, was what got me into Microsoft, and with one of the big companies on your resumé job switching can become almost trivial. The Sankey diagrams for my last 4 job changes are close to being straight lines

That's an extremely common opinion on the internet. But I don't get it. If a 12 week bootcamp is "at least as good" as a 156 week bachelors degree, then what are people learning the remaining 144 weeks of college? I feel like my first 12 weeks of college were worse than a bootcamp - I was working from dusk till dawn having a nervous breakdown trying to keep up. And there were plenty of hard quarters after that. Calculus, Linear Algebra, C++, Differential Equations, Discrete control systems, Numerical analysis, having to make a weather simulation with navier-stokes equations in MATLAB, having to make a room mapping roomba out of a microcontroller and some bump switches. I could go on and on but college was hard AF for me. Jobs have felt like a breeze in comparison. Maybe it was all waste of time, and I should have gone straight into job experience. I'm genuinely saying that, not sarcasm. I just don't know.

What boot camp brings that isn't taught ad nausea in good online courses? Discipline?

I went through full IT-focused university, and added value from those times to my actual work is nearly 0, most of what I learned that I use I myself forced upon university via semester projects.

Campus life was fun, and probably biggest added value from those wild times. But I've spend maybe 70 USD/month on all university study-related costs together back then (study itself was for free so I mean campus, food, traveling... one of very few benefits of coming from former eastern block in Europe).

Getting into massive debt for studies when you can get everything online (and much more if you really have focus & discipline) ain't smart. It will get you a better CV, in some employer's eyes (nothing SV cares about from what I've heard, unless we talk about at least PhD in related fields). Law or medical degrees are a different beast of course, thats a walled garden and its not changing anytime soon.

Honestly, I think not getting a college degree is extremely short sighted. When you want to move into management and don’t have a Bachelor’s and can’t go get a Master’s, and coding loses all the fanfare, it’s going to be difficult to compete with people who have college degrees for a job.

I think bootcamps make sense for someone who got a degree that like anthropology that has high unemployment rates and low starting salaries and wants to move into the coding field, but not a good alternative to a bachelors degree as they are so expensive and won’t offer much value after the first job.

I know someone that worked their way up in a company and the company was sold and it was very difficult to get a similar job, because many places wouldn’t hire them for a similar position without a bachelor’s degree.

Maybe in past decades some employers were willing to give it a shot? I can't imagine anyone who just does this camp getting into "Big Tech" immediately. Maybe they actually were clever, had some relevant experience before, strong interest in technology already.

I know someone who did a bootcamp to move from sales to something they described sales engineer.

I’ve worked with 2 fresh bootcamp grads in the past and they were both fantastic. Our bar for hiring entry-level programmers was that they can write syntactically valid code while pairing with a more experienced engineer, ask lots of questions, and are quick learners.

Nobody expects a bootcamp grad to jump directly into engineering entire features from scratch. They do expect this from uni grads but I can tell from personal experience as a fresh-out-of-uni engineer that this is a terrible idea.

For about a decade, the tech sector had explosive growth, and some companies were taking “anything” they could get, which often included people who don’t know what an array is.

I’m biased about this as a boot camp grad -> staff engineer who has worked with a lot of interns that went on to be very successful engineers from the boot camp I attended, but yes it can definitely help.

When I worked for NCC Group, they heavily emphasized recruiting from Hackbright, specifically because Hackbright doesn't admit men.

You can’t imagine learning much in a few months of full time schooling? Really?