[lhorie]

They cover gaps that most universities overlook (web development), but conversely, skip a lot of CS theory that would otherwise make a more "well-rounded" engineer.

As someone who interviews a lot of candidates, I tend to find that fresh-out-of-bootcamp alumni tend to suffer from tunnel vision (i.e. they may be well-versed enough in one library or framework, but completely fall apart outside of that narrow comfort zone, e.g one abstraction level below or a different framework, never mind a different stack or language)

From conversations with people that have done bootcamps, I heard these courses are also quite expensive (some to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars for 6 months), especially considering that any piece of paper you might earn out of an accelerated course is completely useless and that the web is flooded with similar resources online for autodidacts that are far more affordable and that don't necessarily require strict time commitments (e.g. you could study early in the morning or after work)

Something that I think both universities and bootcamps fail at is that neither really teaches you how to go about implementing architectures on top of building blocks in a meaningful way. Neither goes one level below the abstraction level that the industry uses, nor they explore what different approaches to framework design exist and their trade-offs. As a result, I sometimes see people ardently defending something like redux without having a clue about any of the alternatives, or a "well it works well enough for me so whatevs" attitude. This tends to be dangerous to a beginner's career because a combination of wanting results fast and lack of proper foundations can lead to becoming comfortable with the status quo, and that's the antithesis of software engineering.