Think it depends entirely on the person. I know someone who went through one of those 6 years ago. He worked a grunt job for a while for experience, and has tra

Think it depends entirely on the person. I know someone who went through one of those 6 years ago. He worked a grunt job for a while for experience, and has traded up to a very nice gig today. He also worked pretty hard on the side, teaching himself. I can't speak for the longevity of the training, but he's doing fine. For that matter, other than a terrible 101 class, I have no formal programming training and have been doing this professionally for over 20 years so far. But I'm a bit of a broken record when it comes to degrees-as-gatekeepers - the vast majority of programming jobs do not require a college diploma to competently perform. Very, very few people are writing blank-page Paxos implementations or researching "ai" - they're gluing APIs together and writing business logic. Moderate competence, the ability to do basic research and the patience to get past the WTF stage with a compiler are what you need, not a four year degree.