[sandofsky]

> I think this outlook is a way of gatekeeping engineers who don't have a formal CS background.

If a driving school doesn't teach parallel parking, pointing out that deficiency is not gatekeeping.

> It's just not what most bootcamps are targeted for.

If you're making $35,000 a year in the service industry, making $70,000 translating Photoshop files into HTML is life changing. If making that transition is your only goal, great.

But I think many people enter bootcamps with more ambitious goals. They'd like to move up the career ladder, take on more responsibilities, tackle more difficult problems, and receive commensurate compensation.

People I've talked to who come from non-CS backgrounds said they hit a wall years into their careers, having to play catch-up on the job. In my experience, CS didn't help me as a junior engineer; by the time I was senior, those concepts were invaluable.

When people with CS-gaps hit a wall in their career, we have a two options: we can give them more responsibilities anyway, which sets them up to fail, or we can identify gaps early and help them. That's the opposite of gatekeeping.

[dliff]

Gatekeeping may not be the best word, and I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. OP is not merely pointing out a deficiency: they are suggesting that there is a decline in software quality because of these non-CS people entering the market. Pointing out a deficiency and blaming said deficiencies for a trend of bad software quality are two very different claims. It suggests that one cannot produce good software without a CS background, with which I disagree as an absolute statement. That may be a slight leap, but I think OP made a pretty broad suggestion.

I haven't and wouldn't suggest that people be moved to a position with responsibilities over their head If you want to move up and you need to learn more, of course you need to find a way to learn the required concepts. I did this and continue to do it.

My point about bootcamps is most people who finish them aren't out there getting jobs that require knowledge of CPU pipelines. If that IS happening, someone is really bad at hiring.