The decline of entry-level roles is worrying. Companies are optimizing for immediate productivity but forgetting that juniors grow into seniors. No training, no pipeline, no future talent...
It's not really a great comparison though in my experience. Typically, a good boot camp graduate will come away with a better ability to build real apps, but has a serious lacking in understanding algorithms, OS fundamentals, and many other things That important for Back-End development, especially.
I'm not sure what the solution is to the junior engineer crisis, but I don't think the solution is boot camps. Those have a great place, but if anything a junior coming from a boot camp is generally even more Junior than a junior coming from a computer science degree.
My hypothesis is that The computer science degree route is what will be most useful for juniors in the future. In a world where AI can do the basic coding and build the apps, I see the qualities in appreciating overall design and architecture, especially with regards to scalability. There could definitely be boot camps that teach that sort of stuff, but I am not aware of any that exists currently.
By contrast, a not insignificant number of graduates of computer science and engineering programs struggle to excel outside of writing code. That is only a small part of the job.
In my two decades in the industry I've used my computer science education maybe twice.
Don't diminish people for arriving at software from a different "angle", or doing different things. We're in a highly intellectual field, and the implication that doing "pure CS" is somehow a higher or more valid form of software development is just ridiculous.
It's nothing that a person can't learn outside of a CS degree of course, but most people won't spend the time to dig into the formal and often abstract principles to really understand how different algorithms perform and how choice of data structure impacts performance. I've reviewed code many times that really should be using a linked list or tree but ends up thrown into a hash because that's basically the only data structure the person knows. Not uncommon is a reply "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" which drives me crazy. It doesn't take much effort to just use the right data structure in the first place if you understand their pros and cons.
In the little Iberian Penisula, you would seldom get a training, and being hired as junior without experience in what folks were already doing, was through connections as it usually happens in more "flexible" cultures.
And better have a degree on thee field, either technical school, or higher education.
Trainings? That is for us to do at home instead of watching TV, lets not diminish company profits, someone has to keep their audis, volvos and bmws for management roles.
It is not only due salaries that so many emigrate.
The 2nd hand expression of this I heard was along the lines of: you should already have a portfolio of projects to show, github with stars and/or significant FOSS contributions.
I read the article and it made me realize how far we moved from that model. Apart from everything else, my own company's training is generic training intended to check the box..