[morgante]

I have a CS degree. I don't think it helped me to be a better developer in any meaningful capacity.

I'm still deeply skeptical of the average bootcamp graduate though. They're mostly people following a gold rush without any passion for programming. Moreover, bootcamps do their absolute best to distort hiring signals (ie. specifically targeting interview skills and portfolio projects). I've interviewed dozens of bootcamp graduates and haven't found a single one who I'd hire (that being said, I also think the average college graduate is terrible).

[eropple]

I disagree with regards to a CS degree not making me a better developer, but if I was reading your post three years ago I might have agreed with you. It's interesting--much of what I learned in college was of at best marginal utility when I was starting out, but a ton of it's come back around to be useful today. Which is kind of to be expected, in that a junior developer's not likely to be dealing with much that's particularly challenging (in an absolute sense--of course, it's often going to be challenging in a relative sense). In particular, I spent this morning studying Raft and the Paxos family of distributed consensus algorithms to better understand the tools I'm using so that I can more effectively reason about them for the problem I'm working on; in my adventures I ended up digging Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigm by Tanenbaum out of my closet. (Guess why I had that? ;) )

To this end, I'm generally leery of bootcamp classes, and have not had good success working with bootcamp graduates for more than "line programmer" roles where attention and hours are sufficient to achieve a goal. Of those I can think of, none of the ones I've worked with have been dumb, far from it, but they haven't had the underlying theoretical education (even, generally speaking, something as foundational as a first-year discrete mathematics course) through which to filter whatever length of practical experience they've had. I find both to be extremely valuable, and to make me much better at my job.