[twblalock]

> Most of the people who go to good bootcamps already have strong university educations and would likely have been able to be hired into junior dev roles anyway without the bootcamp.

That depends on how much programming experience they have. Many boot camp attendees have college degrees in non-technical majors and have no coding experience at all.

A boot camp is a way to get coding experience in a structured environment that has credibility with employers. In the view of many companies, self-taught coders don't have that level of credibility, even when they have decent Github portfolios or other proof that they can program.

[skewart]

Interesting. I wonder if that necessity for lending credibility is a somewhat recent thing. Perhaps the popularity of bootcamps makes people who recently got into coding and didn't attend one look worse - companies might assume they couldn't get in to a decent one?

I'm a developer who didn't study CS in undergrad, and I didn't have a problem getting job offers when I was starting out several years ago, self taught and unproven. But bootcamps weren't really a thing back then.

[bdcravens]

I'm self-educated as well, but back then (starting around 1999) there was no Github (so less visibility into a prospect's activity) and no frameworks (so problem solving was more valuable than structure)

[twblalock]

I think it's partially a new form of credentialism. But there is also the question of a candidate's suitability for the job. If you want to hire a Rails developer, for example, someone who just got out of one of the Rails boot camps is probably a more attractive candidate than a self-taught programmer who did not focus on Rails -- even though that self-taught programmer might know more about programming in general.