The other thing to consider is that if 90% of bootcamp grads get an offer (and accept that offer) after their first interview but the remaining 10% are unhireable and proceed to interview with 100 companies each before giving up, you'd have to interview 10 bootcamp grads to find one worth hiring. (Assuming random distribution, that is - if you're the company that bootcamp grads apply to after failing the first interview, you might never get a good applicant) The applicant pool might not match the graduate pool, in other words.
In my case, the friend was someone I play basketball with. I was his only tech friend before he got his job, so I'm not sure how much that helped.
These bootcamps must be pushing the "fake it until you make it" advice to an extreme.
Is it as common as these bootcamps claim? Who knows. It definitely happens.
I can relate about the interviews, though. At a previous company, we interviewed about 20 or so from several different bootcamps. We were excited for this new opportunity. We needed a few juniors. And we thought it would be super easy to find them now.
I think if they hadn't all been coached to interview with overconfidence, we might have hired a couple. But we just couldn't stomach how they would be so completely wrong, not know a certain data structure or algorithm or whatever, and pretend like they do. They weren't necessarily much worse than other candidates, but we just didn't want to deal with the overconfidence.
We still interviewed bootcamp grads on occasion. We never hired any. The only thing that we screened for were bootcamp students that listed projects on their resume in a way that was misleading and made it look like they had a full-time job. We immediately passed on these candidates. That was the majority of the bootcamp candidates, though.