I made it over time based on observations with my coworkers and my personal work experience (I'm currently a tech lead at PayPal, formerly L4 at Google). What I want to do is to teach people to become good engineers, getting a job should be a side effect of that.
I think mainstream bootcamps value getting a job more than actually becoming a good engineer, which is something I disagree with. This also motivates me to show up at the library every day.
If neither you nor universities think that getting a job is more important than becoming a "good engineer" (whatever that means), then who is left to fill this void but the bootcamps you disagree with?
I think if a bootcamp is good enough, it will feed people directly into jobs (possibly without even a technical interview). This is my dream, I have no idea how realistic it is. My library experience (and my work experience) is one giant experience to find out.
If I find some great engineers in the library and bring them into my team directly, will they do good work? If they prove to do good engineering, would it be a sustainable model to hire directly from our volunteer program?
If this works out, we could replicate this model in other public libraries as well.
The comments above are my moonshot ideas, I'm currently experimenting to see if it can be possible.
I think mainstream bootcamps value getting a job more than actually becoming a good engineer, which is something I disagree with. This also motivates me to show up at the library every day.