The same thing happened in the 90's, my coworker's sister got a "Certificate in HTML" and promptly found a job for $80k in 1998. These people wash out, I've been burned enough times by bootcamp grads that I won't hire them anymore
I've never found myself not knowing what I should do, or threatened by a hiring/skills bubble.
When I stopped feeling like I was getting anywhere with front-end I started to take on more back-end projects and sell myself as a full-stack developer.
I've never been in a situation where I've felt "man, I really should have gotten a CS degree": but what do I know; I'm just a web developer.
Maybe we're not talking about web developers?
No advanced engineering skills have been required to make the frontends/backends/architect a system for Fortune 500s and local businesses that I've been involved with. (I'm speaking of things I would have learned in school with CS and math principles had I been able to get past CS 101).
-- college dropout with successful programming career.
I am a bootcamp grad who specialized in undergrad in electrical engineering. I worked for a few years as a research for the one of the top tech universities in the country; I have found that I have a stronger math and physics background than many CS grads. However, many times when doing something I have been stopped by saying "wait aren't you a bootcamp grad? can you even understand this?"
I'm not alone; my bootcamp had plenty of STEM majors. One of colleagues was a biomedical engineer and worked in a research lab and now works in the front end at a top firm in SF. Another was a math major at an Ivy before working full stack. The top guy at my bootcamp went to Berkeley in Biochem and was way way smarter than me.
So stop generalizing. I understand that they are unaccredited institution so you get a wide variance of talent but you can't shit on everyone.
To be honest, your issues probably in how you screen talent. My current company has found success in hiring bootcamp and top schools in the area (Berkeley, Stanford).
It's just a very simple fact that 90% of the bootcamp grads can't program their way out of a paper bag. In fact, most self-trained programmers are vastly better than even the best bootcamp graduates.
The problem with bootcamp grads is that they don't know what they don't know. And they don't know a lot. Undoubtedly some of them will turn out to be great programmers, but not after 3 months. Or even 6. Or even a year.
Again I think you are overgeneralizing since I follow the careers of my class and at least 1/3 of it is doing extremely well in their careers. I think you should be able to program a "paper bag" working at companies like Pivotal Labs, Microsoft, Pinterest, Airbnb, etc. which is where my classmates work at. Maybe I'm not interacting with the right grads though or have a representative sample set, but then again I know you pulled that 90% number out of thin air.
And you know how I know what I don't know? I constantly read, get mentorship from senior engineers at my company, build side projects, etc. The learning process hasn't stopped and it hasn't for many of my colleagues.
I do agree self trained programmers are better, because frankly thats way harder.
Yeah people with hard science degrees and/or from top schools, I'm less skeptical about. The guy who was a waiter 3 months ago and now saying he's a software engineer, very concerning.
It is 100% possible to be an ace developer without a CS degree. However years of hiring experience has made my bullshit detector ring alarms with self-taught / bootcamp guys. If they have a hard-science degree it's less risky. Honestly I don't bother interviewing these people anymore without a warm introduction, it's hard enough to find good devs and the ratio of good to bad is so much worse with the self-taught crowd.
