Having been on the hiring side and interviewed plenty of juniors I've found there seems to be a general lack of "try" anymore. I remember when I started 10 year

Having been on the hiring side and interviewed plenty of juniors I've found there seems to be a general lack of "try" anymore. I remember when I started 10 years ago I felt like the average junior I was competing against was a very talented problem solver. Perhaps I'm just being given bad candidates. The majority of them seem to come from bootcamps these days rather than Bachelors or Associates programs. They're trained in a single stack and without the formality of problem solving you learn in a degree program the average bootcamp developer seems to be too linearly tracked to really succeed at least in the mid-grade startup world I am in. They're capable of brain dumping cracking the coding interview, can solve very trivial (e.g. linear) problems, but when asked to think outside the box they seem unable to because it doesn't fit into any nice little box they learned at the bootcamp. I suppose this could also be a function of people trying to "break into" programming from a field that is completely unrelated expecting easy money and a comfortable job. I suspect it's a shell shock for them as much as it is for me the interviewer. Bootcamps, in my opinion, had good intentions but ended up not only lowering the quality of developer but also increasing the pool of applicants. After getting burned by say 30% of your junior hires it makes sense you'd be more cautious. For every solid graduate from a program in IT or CS, there are 20 "graduates" of a 4 week, extremely expensive, and borderline worthless bootcamp program. Programming is quickly going the way real estate did in the early 00's. The experienced guys will continue to make money and the people trying to get into the industry make almost nothing. ABET accredits CS programs, perhaps there should be an accrediting body to stop all these fly by night money sinkholes we call bootcamps. Lord knows the only people making money on bootcamp education are the frauds that run them.