True, but when I think of "junior" or "entry-level" anything I think of someone with no real world, on the job experience, and that applies to boot camp and college grads.

Boot camps might very well be better than college programs in terms of preparing someone to use development tools and methods as opposed to focusing on the theory behind them, but at the end of the day, you're still not doing "real" work where your choices have consequences in a boot camp as you would on the job.

Working constructively with other people in the field (including answering to and being able to discuss and defend projects with colleagues and superiors), completing projects within time or budget constraints, and being able to make your own informed decisions with regard to things like project scope, methods, and direction, with a proven history of success -- those are the skills that separate "junior" from whatever comes after that, at least in my opinion.

Oh, I agree. For one thing, Senior engineers have lots of failures under their belt. Another trait of Seniors is knowing when "good enough" is good enough for the task at hand vs. the "best" way they were taught in school.

This is a fair point, but most vocational programs last years not months, so that is where the analogy breaks down here. I think "vocational" code schools offering 2-year degrees would be very, very attractive as an alternative to a traditional CS degree (both for students and hiring managers), but that's not what we're looking at.

According to a quick Google search, the average program length for these boot camps in 2015 was 11 weeks. That is on par with a single semester at a university. Even if you take a heavy course load of only practical CS courses, one semester is not nearly enough to prepare someone fully for a full-time dev position at top-tier companies. Sure, they may be able to answer the interview questions...but then what? I'm pretty skeptical of this trend and don't see it ending well for most of the boot camp graduates or companies who hire a large number of them.

> To use an imperfect analogy, who would be better at actually building houses; a vocational school grad (who built houses all day as part of his education) or a college educated architect? A lot of programming these days is "hammering nails" not architectural design.

If bootcamps were vocational schools things would be great. As it is, how many are more like for-profit scam courses handing out unrecognized certificates with the main aim of teaching people how to game the programming interview process?