As a hiring manager who has interviewed many many bootcamp grads and supervised a couple, I don't think they're are worth it. They're vastly overpromising what

As a hiring manager who has interviewed many many bootcamp grads and supervised a couple, I don't think they're are worth it. They're vastly overpromising what skill level you will be at when you graduate and how easily you will be able to find a job. Because they are trying to compress a lot into a short period of time, and because they are trying to keep it interesting and give students early wins, they seem to not spend nearly enough time on the basics, and jump straight in to using frameworks that do everything for you, the end result being that a bootcamp grad can quickly whip up an ok looking app that has basically no functionality but as soon as you ask them to do something complicated, they get stuck. Sure, that's not true of all grads, but I'd argue that the ones who come out of a bootcamp with serious skills are the passionate ones who would've done just as well or better on their own, so at best they wasted a bunch of money. You are much better off going the self taught route to start off, maybe take community college classes on the side. If dabbling like that doesn't inspire you and give you the fuel you need to learn what you need to know on your own then software engineering may not be the ideal career for you anyway, what you know is a small part of the job, what you can figure out and learn are also huge factors.