> There are also a lot of developer bootcamps: within 8–12 weeks you can become a developer. I think this is great if you want to become a developer within a small agency or working in house. Those „fast tracks“ mainly teach you how to code, but not other important stuff like software engineering, algorithms and data structures, patterns, databases, theoretical stuff about computers and so on which you would need in bigger projects. Bigger companies mostly want you to have formal education. The same is true when you want to climb up the corporate ladder. Universities don’t really teach you how to code, but they teach you timeless things! I never regretted my hard way, because I learned so many different things.

While it's true that a lot of organizations still put a lot of value on a traditional education, the idea that going to a bootcamp qualifies you for work "within a small agency or working in house" just seems condescending. I work for a fortune 500 company and we hire bootcamp grads all the time, many of them have gone from apprentices to junior to mid level engineers in just a couple years, they're fucking fantastic.

I strongly feel that getting relevant applicable skills is essentially to starting a career in software engineering, and that more theoretical skills can then be acquired along the way. I've seen it several times.