I believe the main reasons were:

* The local management are non-technical and have a rudimentary equation that 1 developer = 1 productivity unit

* The bootcamp has some really great salespeople

* Hiring is generally difficult for great dev talent, so their logic is just to hire anyone for the numbers, otherwise their budget gets constrained by kafkaesque finance practice from the companies HQ.

* Local political and PR reasons, the company is "hiring local talent", "equal opportunities" etc.

Sounds like four political reasons. Better strap in for the long haul cause it doesn’t sound like things are gonna change quickly. Unless you happen to find that person who can understand and motivate developers while navigating the political power structure toward real solutions. Unfortunately, those people are even more rare than the 10x developer.

3 is not political. It’s hard to maintain hiring standards in this crazy market when you’re under business pressure to scale and it’s only natural management gets desperate after some time. I’ve seen this firsthand several times.

On point 1, perhaps it’s time to whip out the Mythical Man Month?

Yeah good luck with that. Most managers I talk to still think adding more people to late project = faster delivery.

Probably not going to do any good, based on the rest of the description of the situation.

Its a UK company so they have the British Disease = "don't want to pay for training"

Should we call it "British Disease" if it's already universally infecting companies world-wide?