You're making some big assumptions about their interview process. Maybe new CS grads from 4 year programs are passing the interviews (and being successful on the job), in which case their filter may be working well.

None of the graduates I talked to could handle CS grad level questions, especially the typical ones you get at any given tech startup large or small (sorting, binary search, etc), and I never approached my interviews with them that way.

Here is a real-world way I would try to asses somebody's capabilities fairly given their experience. Each candidate generally has a capstone project. Some kinda small app like a todo list or something written in Rails. I would have them walk me through the app they built, explaining some things that they did and asking why they made decisions a certain way. This was an incredibly soft test just to make sure THEY actually wrote it, as frequently code would be shared or TA's would help a lot. I wanted to know that they knew why they did something. If that went well, which it often didn't, I would give them a small feature to add. Something like "how would you expand your authentication to have a password reset", then hold their hand while we walked through adding this feature.

I'm all for non-traditional educations especially when it comes to SWE, but at the end of the day you are applying to a 6-figure job in a competitive market. The failure here is on the Bootcamps that convinced these people that 3 months of study can qualify your for ANY 6 figure job. Compare this to a traditional vocational school. I get the spirit of the parent comment, trust me I really do. But I can sign up for a 28-week metal fabrication course and be guaranteed that I will learn how to weld and get a $60k/year job as a welder. Startup bootcamps are marketing to the same people, with the same vocational messaging. It just is not the same, and it's bad for everybody.

Questions such as pseudocode a "(sorting, binary search, etc)" algorithm on the whiteboard are BS questions used to haze interviewees and make the interviewer feel like the big man on campus. Almost no working programmer ever implements any of this BS unless they are doing very specialized work.

I've interviewed 100s of programmers for several very well known tech company and specifically tried to get tech interviewers to tone that down. Doing so allowed us to hire some great non-CS JR programmers who are now team leads and even CTOs at other companies.

I completely agree

Sorry, but if some "brand new programmer" can't get any real work done, then it is not a programmer at all. There can be even excellent students or someone to invest further time and resources, but professionals, they are not.

>> but professionals, they are not

This is exactly correct. And if you're interviewing juniors/graduates trying to find "professionals" then you really don't understand hiring.

"We're looking for professionals with no commercial experience." It's a contradiction in terms.

BS.

For a corporate setting that may have the resources to hire people for the potential and long term maintenance of their cogs, sure, hire "recent graduates" with zero ability to produce any value to the company.

But don't tell me that you can't find young people with little to no experience that are talented enough to run circles on any "experienced professional" and actually be useful from the start. I've done it myself more than once.

So you want to pay someone to train them.

Why not? That's how it used to work. Provided they can demonstrate a minimum of CS fundamentals, things like tools (git, ssh, etc.), how to work with a large code base, good style, and any number of things that a new grad needs to know to become a competent junior engineer can be taught.

I think this is exactly what the original comment was taking issue with for the bootcampers.

>but as soon as you threw any real world problem that required any deviation from their established lane they completely floundered

He quoted it himself, but failed to notice the issue. I myself have noticed people who went through 4 year programs tend to be much more adaptable as the universities tend to do a better job of building a solid foundation.

Absolutely agree. Juniour doesn't mean "without experience". I will venture far enough as to say that a juniour developer should have very solid tech skills and real world experience.

I've known many people myself included who had 1-2 years of professional experience by the time they graduated from university. And naturally these folks would hit the ground running when hired post graduation, which is as it should be.