This essay doesn't consider institutions or classes that would help someone with absolutely zero programming experience try to prepare for the bootcamp admissions process that the author advocates.

While it makes sense to me that the bootcamps should be more cautious about their admissions standards, it still raises the question of what people who have written 0 computer programs are supposed to do when thinking about pursuing a bootcamp. And I guess there are many potential answers to that, but it's a problem quite closely related to this essay's argument.

I remember that at Berkeley there was CS 61A for people who had some prior programming experience (not necessarily directly related to the course content) and CS 3 for people who didn't. Bearing in mind that some people who would be interested could not currently pass the author's proposed screening question (implementing a JavaScript function to return the longest word in a string), it seems someone then ought to create the CS 3 equivalent to prepare those would-be applicants to do so. (And maybe that's ultimately an existing free online class of some kind.)