First, dont consider your job is mainly coding, it's not, it's mainly solving problems. If your amateur journalist solve company problems as well as you with that little education: change company to solve harder problems, it's not their fault they re super good where they are and you're just the same seething you over educated yourself while stuck at changing button colors.
Now focus on how you solve problems beyond coding: do you understand requirements, can you even propose some, is what you build always either well working or fast delivered (both are ok, rarely done by the same people, both can increase your reputation).
I work in a large bank full of very old devs and empty of fad. I m a bit of a wild card because I m only 35 yo, so I know javascript for instance, prefer maven to ant, etc: but my true value is that I deliver prototypes fast that I increase in quality as they are used rather than spend 2 months hesitating over impossible edge cases: this worked fairly well and I have enemies as well as support, and that's fine. Do what you can, help your company, change if you're useless, and that ll make you worthy of the craft :)
I switched careers, spent a lot of time on learning to code and am a great developer but have to work alongside people who have a CS degree but consistently write poorly-designed spaghetti code.
Boot camp graduates probably do drag down the average competence level a bit, but it was already shockingly low.
In the same time, I think now people just take this profession for granted. I don't like being X, I heard that being a developer pays well, so I will become one in 3 to 6 months. I wouldn't be able to be a tax consultant in one of the big 4 for example, just by reading about taxes on Udemy.
One of them is "I spent years to learn this and now these plebs can just learn it in 3 months then take my title?". I'm not saying this is _your_ emotion, but I certainly notice this in me.
Anyway, I think this kind of emotion is not productive. If programming really is so easy to learn then maybe we made a big mistake by taking a 4 year university program to learn it.
That said, I actually think programming is hard and whatever you learn in a 3 month bootcamp will in no way give you all the tools and experience you need.
The problem though is the average.
New programmers look out to what everyone else is doing in order to learn.
But because most programmers are beginners, it ends up just being a cycle of beginners teaching each other.
When people with experience do speak out, what they say sounds so completely different from what the rest are saying, so the beginners don't listen to their advice. They will think these people with contrarian perspectives are just weird.
This is exactly how I feel. Even having gone through a more practical IT education, most of the folks in my class were really really bad (and not very excited about programming besides). That combined with folks that do a little bootcamp and then end up doing some sort of frontend development is honestly just depressing. It's hard enough to help managers understand good vs bad engineering, I don't want to do it every day for the people I work with too. Especially not knowing that a large percentage of them will never get any better.
But alas, I've spent 6-7 years learning and grinding, I wanted to be a proper web developer. Just this morning I read another post discussion about RISC-V and ARM architectures and thought to myself - I'm still an idiot. I have no idea what these guys are talking about. I still feel like an impostor. I've helped my company deliver some awesome products and get paid really well but theres is still too much I don't know.
Now Im in charge of training new devs, freshly minted CS grads and they can barely write readable code. I'm still jealous that they have a CS degree which can open many more doors.
Every company needs a website and there are plenty of cheap services offering to build one. But the real money is made if you can make someone's internal processes or production planning more efficient. For example, what's the worth of an AI that automates a process that currently costs $1 mio annually? Management will be ecstatic to pay you $200k annually to get those cost savings...
And for those tasks, you need a strong algorithmic and mathematical background.
Why do you say this? If you implement it via AI then sure, but I’ve done plenty of process automation without needing a strong mathematical background.
What I have in mind is speaking to business people to understand what they do, learn what the business rules are and write systems that implement those flows (and hopefully skip steps that are actually redundant).
Perhaps you meant something else?
I know I might get some hate for this, but one of the most demoralising things for me recently was to feel out that I wasted my life and youth for nothing. I spent 4 years in a CS focused high school, where 60% of our classes were just maths and CS, then spent another 5 years at the university. Even though most of the stuff learned there is theoretical and most of my knowledge comes also from freelancing and learning on my own, the actual formal education I think it also helped, especially in the university where we had some amazing professors.
What I see now is that everyone is getting into learn to code programs, a colleague from my company, who was a PM went to a 3 month JS/learn to code course and is now officially a "programming instructor", another friend was a journalist, took a 6 month JS course online and is now a "senior" developer. I understand and know people that switched careers, spent a lot of time on learning to code and are great developers, but most of the people aren't like that, and it feels somehow demeaning to our craft, that now after a 3 month online course, everyone is a developer.