A lot of the bootcamp candidates I've met can code just fine, but often lack a deeper understanding of software development. Often do just fine on interviews th

A lot of the bootcamp candidates I've met can code just fine, but often lack a deeper understanding of software development. Often do just fine on interviews that test the application of a specific skill, but struggle to answer more free-form questions. One of my favorite interview questions is "how would you design a text editor?" Bootcamp candidates and recent grad candidates often struggle a bit. Recent grad candidates often jump into a straightforward solution like breaking characters into contiguous arrays by line. More experienced candidates take more effort to put the task into context. Is this a text editor for the web? Is it more geared towards editing plain text? Can we assume relatively frequent line breaks? The best candidates think of improvements on their own. One candidate suggested automatic saves every 10-15 seconds, and could explain the backend changes necessary to make it such that the saved copy was retrieved when the user navigated back to the page. Others talked about locality and caching when talking about optimization. This sort of question is more like a foundation, and the interviewer is looking to see what the candidate is building on top of that foundation. Granted, this isn't to say that bootcamp candidates aren't good. Not being able to effectively answer those sorts of interview questions signals that the candidate is better fit for a junior role - which bootcamp candidates and new grads are probably looking for anyway. Realistically, probably only 20% of my university time was spent learning how to develop software - maybe 30-35% if we include club and personal projects and not just class assignments. A decent 40% on topics wholly unrelated to software development, and 40% was spent on more academic areas of tech not really related to writing code. The latter is useful and has given me a deeper understanding of a lot of topics (ML, Operating systems, compilers, network infrastructure) but probably doesn't add nearly as much value to my employer as coding ability. I can see how a bootcamp could teach someone to code as well as a new grad in 3-6 months.