I am self-taught and cringe when i think back to my early days because I knew so little and didn't realize it. I've never attended any CS courses and learned everything I know from putting in almost constant work on the side (I mean this literally, I almost only work on creative projects with all of my spare time) -- but I can't overstate how much I learned from people on the job as well, they propelled me to new heights. All this is to say: I don't begrudge newcomers and have always tried to give back more than what I got from others when I was Jr...

But good lord bootcamps do not produce much in the way of talent in my experience. I'm sure there are some shining stars that benefited, but I have yet to meet one of them. One guy I worked with fully admitted to me in private that he plagiarized his "final" for bootcamp which was a rather difficult algorithm. He just used some open source code he found on github and only slightly modified it. The code he wrote that I had to support was some of the worst spaghetti I've had to pick apart and fix and he was the lead engineer for the company.

These companies would make more money with proper talent. Code camps need to go away.

I've worked with many bootcampers and all but one have been fantastic. And the one wasn't bad because of arrogance or deception; they were a super nice person with plenty of integrity. They were bad at their job because they simply had no feel for programming, and would have been just as bad if they'd had a CS degree.

Bootcamps are like anything: you get out what you put in. They are a(n often effective!) way of learning a skill. If there's a problem, it's with tech hiring and its ability to accurately evaluate candidates. But that's an intrinsically hard task, and I don't know if there's a real solution (and the inaccuracy cuts both ways, and affects everyone, regardless of where they learned to code).

Stop inflating your own narrow experience and projecting it onto a huge swath of people. Pushing stereotypes is harmful.

I gave an anecdote mentioning one shitty individual who would likely do shitty things even as a proper CS student yes. Beyond that I'm dissing the form of education, not the individual human. Maybe they're "nice" people but if they are leading a team of engineers right out of bootcamp, you're gonna have a bad time (and I've seen this happen in at least one occasion as I mentioned).

Looking back over this hours later I want to add the following:

the anecdote I offered above was not an effort to paint code camp participants as untrustworthy or incompetent. My point is that this individual was lacking in skills and knowledge beyond a Jr level engineer and plagiarized at least part of his codecamp work.

The only thing he needed codecamp for was the "education" on his resume and a shortcut through the interview process. He was made lead engineer, potentially just to boost his resume, but regardless he was involved in "fullstack" development which was leading to some really really nasty issues. He had already worked there for some time once I joined the team, so I have no idea how limited his skills or knowledge were when he joined. What I did see was that he took a codecamp shortcut. This is harder to do with college CS courses and totally pointless if you're doing it for the fun of learning and creating things in the first place (which is the motivation for my and many other people's self-education).

I've worked with self, college and bootcamp educated people. To reiterate I PERSONALLY have not encountered someone from bootcamp who was beyond Jr level. I'm sure there are people out there who are very talented and have used bootcamp education to their benefit, but I see it as an easy system to abuse and I'm skeptical over the actual educational benefits offered by these schools.

I would also like to add that I have worked for a number of companies who refuse to even look at a resume from people with codecamp education (hiring people who are self-educated over codecamp educated even). I think this is a heavy handed approach and disagree with it.

Regardless of the source of education, loading up your company with people who are only Jr to Mid level is a recipe for disaster.

You are so right. People now in the industry know the mechanism of money and capital much better than software. But as a software engineer who loves the technology and products that we can build from it, I would really appreciate real DBAs with in-depth skills. After all, databases are essential, and we need experts.

> I would really appreciate real DBAs with in-depth skills.

heheh, I hear that all the time, but show me the money...

The implications for the future of this industry, if what you say is true, are profound.

Isn't it true for a lot of newish industries ?

For instance we have the EV boom, and visibly a lot of companies are rushing in to try to make as much as they can without planning for what they would do if they become the next Toyota. But surely, some are planning a bit more ahead (or have a more long term viable approach, even if by accident), and time will tell who they are.

My glass half full view would be that we don't need most companies to succeed, as long as the well isn't poisoned.

The issue is that we're not that new anymore, people have been doing software engineering for at least half a century.

In the beginning, if you wanted a computer, you had to design and build it yourself. You had to be an expert in electronics and computer science to do it. And back then, there were no computer parts. You had to manufacture everything yourself from vacuum tubes. Once you were done, you would have a tiny amount of memory and processing power to work with, meaning that you had to be an expert programmer to take advantage of that tiny processing power. And, there were no stored programs. Your program was implemented as an arrangement of cables on a plugboard, something that was error prone and time consuming. There were no compilers or interpreters for your code therefore no compiler errors, no runtime errors, no debugger, no anything. If things didn't work, they just didn't work and some types of mistakes would have disastrous effects on the hardware.

Now, you don't need any of that. Yet, you can call yourself "full stack". No one truly full stack anymore.

no one is saying to take it back to assembly, but at least maybe try to understand how asynchronous code works if you're going to try to program professional applications in Javascript.