I'm not disagreeing, but I think the implication is that the bootcamps tend to leave their students without the fundamental knowledge to progress further in their career.

Not saying you need a full 4 year program and a CS degree. I don't have a CS degree, but 2 degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering. That gave me a very solid and low level concept of computing that most CS grads dont get. Programming languages are a dime a dozen. Some are better suited for certain tasks than others.

Someone going to a Ruby on Rails or Node/JS boot camp isn't going to get that exposure to multuple languages. They're not going to know that, say Python is a better language/ecosystem than JavaScript for scientific analysis. They're not going to be exposed to C, C++, C#, Java, Rust or Go. Personally, I wouldnt even interview someone that's taken a boot camp in C or C++. The languages are too nuanced and complex to even get a foothold in 3 months.

Sorry this ended up very rantish, and I didn't mean for it to be so. I'm trying to make the point that while, yes, boot camps serve a purpose and may be useful to some folks, they will not and are not designed to give you enough knowledge to truly excel in the industry with the knowledge gleaned from the boot camp alone. It will take an extremely passionate and aggressive self learner to be more than a junior after a boot camp.

You have an engineering degree, so.... The joke was, when I was an undergrad, that CS students were the last people you'd ever hire because they couldn't design a system at all (or program properly). The first you'd hire were the computer engineers, aka you and me (of course). Engineers are born, for the most part, not made.

Over the past 20 years, this general principle has been validated, at least in my experience - a good boss I had once said only the top 10-15% of people in IT know what they're doing. The next 20-30% have some idea, but they're sort of useless. The bottom half, you do not hire if you can help it...

I also don't have a CS degree, but I tend to agree with you that something quite serious in terms of scale and scope is missing in most bootcamps. For instance, it doesn't make sense to expose people who have never written a program before to RoR or Node if they haven't yet learned how to do basic tasks like command line functionality, learning the *NIX file system, text and data manipulation, etc, let alone if/then statements.

Juniors are great when their inexperience is correlated with youth, fresh outlook on the world, a burning passion for the subject, lack of fear with new ideas that seem controversial to the old guard, and frankly fewer family commitments such that succeeding at their job and learning and growing is their number one priority.

Very little of this applies to people on their second career doing bootcamps for a leg up.

Hello culture of age discrimination in tech. Didn't expect to see you here.

I genuinely expected you to pivot to something interesting or novel halfway through your post and was very disappointed when I got to the end. This comment eloquently depicts everything that is wrong with corporate culture in general, occasionally magnified in IT.