Going to a bootcamp shows you are just another good student, who can sit in a classroom for 10hours straight in a day, during 12 weeks, and get good marks.
When you are self-taught, you show that beyond your new technical skills, you have the self-discipline, and drive to learn and practice new skills from scratch, without someone holding your hand. This must be a skill that any employer would value highly. Employers would want their SW engineers to be autonomous, and have the self-discipline to initiate to keep learning, because with SW, you need to constantly learn if you want your skills to remain up to date. Teaching yourself SW is hard. If you manage to do that, the proof is there that you are passionate about what you're doing, because I don't believe it is possible to teach yourself SW without being passionate about it.
There are heaps of resources online nowadays to teach yourself SW engineering.
It's really about how much money you have. If you've got significant savings like I did, it makes sense to pay as time becomes more valuable than money in your life plan.
You also seem to think attending a bootcamp automatically precludes a student from being able to provide themselves with continuing education.
There are different motivations for people entering a bootcamp and some are looking for that paycheck. But again, that does not necessarily make them a bad SW engineer. And if those people would like to keep their salary, they will learn soon enough that they will not get very far with stale knowledge.
Don't get me wrong, I've met some brilliant and capable bootcampers, who I suspect would've done just as well or better outside of a bootcamp, but my point is that having a bootcamp portfolio isn't much of a signal.
It completely boggles my mind that someone can just go and do a "bootcamp" and then land a job two or three months later. Is there really that much demand for coders out there? Such a person could easily do more harm than good.
He was a disaster, they'd have been much better off with a bootcamp graduate.
1) The negative image of coding bootcamps on HN is worse than in industry, not the other way. There are plenty of coders who came from bootcamps now working in industry. I agree that you aren't as well regarded a CS major, but it is definitely better than self taught.
2) The things you listed he should do are pretty much the things you'll do at a coding bootcamp. If you can stay on a good course and keep yourself motivated, it is completely reasonable to think you can be in a similar position in the same time frame (with an extra 10-20k in the bank.) However, you should be very honest about those two qualifications. It's quite easy to get side tracked/not do as much work as you think you will.
3) You're right on about the new tech. The reason that we think it's cool is because it's the thing that everyone is talking about on HN. The reason there is so much traction with all of these topics is because there aren't a lot of applications for them and a lot of people are playing with them. I'd expect an entry level coding job to be writing REST APIs and front ends for CRUD apps. You might be pleasantly surprised, but I wouldn't quit your job expecting otherwise.
a) The thing that isn't frequently talked about wrt bootcamps is that you don't get a job after the bootcamp. I'd expect 30-60 days of applying and interviewing before you get the job, just FYI.