Doesn’t help that most of them taught precisely the things LLMs are good at. Boiler plate front end and a sprinkling of glue together back ends.
Can do the work, but can't get hired? Find a reasonable boot camp (hard), do the time and get access to their placement assistance. From there, now you've got work experience and will have an easier time getting through hiring pipelines.
I think they were definitely oversold as the solution to everyone's lack of a good job, and some of them were outright scams.
I went to a 4-yr university for a CS degree. I mean I did learn a lot and I don't regret it, but tbh I didn't learn any web dev languages or most things I use at my job today through my program. I learned C, C++, etc. which was super interesting at the time but it just doesn't translate into JS/React-world super well. I think there's a place for legit bootcamps that focus on what you'll be using in your day-to-day and connecting you with some potential hiring companies. They just need to be careful to not guarantee anything and I think they could benefit from almost an internal hiring round after the program to see if you have the skills to even be recommended for a job. That way hiring managers could build more trust with the bootcamps.
The technology you learn is not really the point though, it's all of the fundamental underlying principles
Have you ever worked with someone who has no concept of Big O? I have. They wrote almost woefully inefficient code, and actually had no concept that code efficiency was even something you could reason about
This is not a terribly difficult thing to teach to a Junior, but it's just one example of things you learn in a degree program that bootcamps generally gloss over
It also highly depends on which bootcamp you hire from as some do do push on CS fundamentals using Javascript as the language to teach.
The top bootcamps filters out a lot of unserious, low quality candidates for you already. In addition, it's not a 3 month learning experience. It's 3-6 months of prep work, 3 months of actual bootcamp, and then likely months of practicing leetcode for interviews. It can take a year.
When I finally got hired, somebody applied who had started coding the same time i did, only she had gone to a bootcamp. All the time I had been looking for work, she had been working. Not saying I’d do anything differently, but no question bootcamp would have shortened the journey.
I sometimes think this attitude that you can’t teach good programming practices quickly on the job comes from folks who have never tried. We literally have code review practices for this reason.
Learning informally, or formally, in person, online, in groups is all valuable.
In my experience, the former produces much higher quality developers and it's not even close.
I'd put that on the material being taught, how it's organized, and being presented.
Why? Teaching adults is very different than teaching children, and universities mostly teach how to teach children as a degree program.
In terms of teaching adults, there are ways that have existed for hundreds if not a few thousand years at least: apprenticeship, learning with and beside someone who knows how.
Pro-tip for all bootcampers: run thru something like javascript30.com first.
There's a large gap between your local market value and that in a poorer country. On the Balkan, a nurse will have a terrible salary, but if she goes through a bootcamp and learns enough to be useful in QA, she'll quickly make 2-3x what she would earn working in a hospital. There's a pretty hard ceiling when you approach Western income levels, but everyone I talked to is super happy hitting that ceiling, because it'll mean they have great income compared to the national average.
The average lower bound for the quality of a bootcamp graduate is likely lower but the upper bound is limitless.
And I’m saying that as a electrical engineering graduate who knows some basic things that some CS grads don’t know that they should really know better than I know.
For working people it's not necessarily the cost of a degree, it's the opportunity cost of time out of workforce. Rent/mortgage still needs to be paid.
> settle for a scam?
Yes, boot camps are a "scam" in a sense, but when done right they are a happy one. The service they are providing is legitimacy washing. It is working around credentialism in the hiring process by providing a baseline credential or ticket to participate. A company that wouldn't hire a "self taught programmer" will often be more inclined to give a "boot camp grad" a chance. Really it's the same person, just with 100% more rubber stamp.
It is VERY rare in my experience that you're going to take someone with no aptitude or experience in software development and make them employable in a few weeks or months. This part is oversold. But targeted training on in-demand skills (e.g. the modern JS horror show) can be quite beneficial for people who already have some foundational skills.
In Switzerland if you make a second degree it's usually shortened and better payed. Plus often sub-financed by the state. I made my programming degree with people between 19 and 50.
Never did I meet anyone proclaiming doing a private certificate bootcamp thingy.