I've hired from bootcamps multiple times, it's a great source of junior developers. It is however a show of the absolute minimum amount of skill a person could possibly have before you take them on as a developer.

If this person says that they've been coding for years, then that puts them at a way higher level than a recent bootcamp grad.

Instead of doing a bootcamp, spend a week or two building simple apps in whatever category you want to work in. If you want to be a web dev, a little node.js backend with a react frontend perhaps, or similar with Django or Rails.

Plonk it on your github, make sure you put on your resume that you're a junior that's been coding for years but never put anything in production, and you'll definitely be ahead of the bootcamp grads in my book.

That still doesn’t make bootcamps a red flag. Also, there are many self-taught programmers who complete a bootcamp just to gain confidence, make connections, etc.

Agreed

I think it's a red flag when it's also attached to a certain kind of confidence that their bootcamp experience was on-par with years of experience or education. As in, the kind of attitude where that they feel that because they went through the exhausting bootcamp stage, everything next is just an application of what came from the bootcamp. It's something I've only seen with programmers from bootcamps.

Honestly, never encountered that. In my experience bootcampers are usually self-conscious about their background. Maybe they behave differently at small companies/startups (my experience is at a big tech co)?

That could be it. I work outside of "tech" these days at smaller orgs that naturally attract people with significantly different personal motivations to those in the tech world.

I know someone who took a bootcamp after completing a college CS degree because he felt that the CS curriculum didn't actually give him enough practical programming experience. Some CS programs are terrible, so I'm not surprised he found the bootcamp to be a benefit.

Yea, this is weird. Bootcamps can be useful or useless (depending on a course, instructors and a person), but surely they don't do any harm?

Not everyone goes there to get technical skills, there are people going there for soft skills (practicing working on assignments, especially group assignments, etc.) and networking (at least some bootcamps advertise they have some relationship with recruiting agencies).

His red flag for bootcampers is a red flag for his managerial skills