Recently, a guy named Haseeb made some news for scoring a job worth $250K at Airbnb even though he was an English major who was not even a year removed from his bootcamp entry date. People were pissed but if you read the guy's story, you'd see that he's not your regular bootcamper...he was a millionaire as a teenager after teaching himself how to play poker...and this is how he describes his bootcamp experience:
http://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-ii...
> Entering into App Academy, barely knowing the basics of Ruby, I came into the office and grinded every day, spending 80+ hour weeks just coding and studying. I’d come in at 9AM in the morning and leave around midnight, 7 days a week, sleeping in a bunk bed in SOMA in a 200 square feet shared room.
How many students at even the best colleges can describe themselves as working that hard on anything (well, other than athletes)?
I am a self-taught programmer that has done exactly this. What good is reading the material if you don't pound some of that stuff into your brain? I never did homework in school, but I have done tons of it for myself.
Will Hunting was right about a library card, but many -- I think most -- people require the discipline imposed on them by a university setting to actually do the work. Obviously -- obviously! -- you can learn this stuff on your own. But I doubt there are many self-taught programmers who've actually spent hours drawing out trees and solving recurrences and so on. To the extent that you've done that, then hooray for you!