I will try to refrain from being anecdotal here, but some of it will leak in, I’m sure. Boot camps usually strap in their students for about 3-6 months and mak

I will try to refrain from being anecdotal here, but some of it will leak in, I’m sure. Boot camps usually strap in their students for about 3-6 months and make them learn extremely basic coding in some modern stack with html/css. Depending on the company, this may be a better/cheaper alternative to starting talent that was in the grinder for 4 years but may not have any other business knowledge - or sometimes lack knowledge aside from c++/java. (Not arguing the merits here, personally I prefer depth of understanding to a mechanical and superficial understanding, but business needs do differ) So is it fair to say boot camps are stealing your money? The same way that any for-profit educational institute might. At the same time, they have a similar function to other educational institutions in that they are largely a culling mechanism and not an educational one - but that is a problem across the board. It’s unfortunate that they market and promise what they do, as it’s just unrealistic - but that doesn’t mean that they don’t do anything. I don’t have the data anymore, but from multiple cohorts what I saw was a slightly skewed bell curve, where the top of the class (~1 out of every 10 or so) tends to do well and find a decent entry level job in 3-8 months, the bottom of the class just flatlines and really don’t learn a thing (1-4 of 10), and the remaining hustle hard to break into the industry for ~2 years or decide it’s not for them. I haven’t run the numbers, but I know a lot of my college educated friends are not working in what they studied, so for those that ended up not in a code related role, but did not bottom out (I.e. they did learn some basics of how code works), were they scammed by the universities? (Okay, actually, as a victim of this myself, I’d say yes here, but again, I’m just pointing out this may not be isolated to boot camps) Summary: only go to a boot camp if you have your eyes wide open and know it is a culling mechanism and that if you’re not in the top of the class or exceptionally lucky, you will not have an easy time finding employment. Even the top of the class won’t have an easy time, but it’ll be easier than you. You will probably leave knowing more about code than before regardless, but also be aware of how shallow your knowledge will be, regardless of how long or intense your boot camp is.