To be fair, learning to code well is HARD and takes a lot of time, and more importantly, practice. Stayin inside coding as a kid was the best decision of my life, career-wise.
I agree with you and parent. I think the real value of programs like this probably ought to be to help identify people who do have an aptitude and interest for this but for whatever reason haven't learned already and want an alternative to a college degree program to get in the workforce. I suspect the net that's cast is often quite wider than that though :)
Totally agree with this. The key is that if you're hiring someone from a bootcamp program you need to carefully build an on-boarding process for them that can effectively spoon feed the critical bits of your infrastructure/platform to them so that they don't waste any time in becoming productive.
At Code Fellows we have quite a few students who use boot camps to switch stacks or they have legacy CS experience that they are getting back into. We also have a lot of newer folks. One of the things that we've seen at Code Fellows is that incoming students need to have a Foundational understanding of data structures, algorithms, and data types—and also a experience in the stack they are going to take a boot camp in. If they have these ingredients and relevant experience then they can take off in those 8 weeks and be prepared and inspired to keep learning, growing, and get a job. We are super clear that this is a HARD life long process—and that's part of the fun/agony of it all :)
