[mehulkar]

I think this is a pretty significant point. Thanks for bringing it up. I was part of Dev Bootcamp and this is where I thought the whole experience lacked as well. But here's the interesting bit: I left the experience feeling like there was a gap in my knowledge and wanting to go fill it. Even in the last week I was heckling the mentors for a deeper understanding.

By contrast, I left college last May with a large theoretical base in Finance and with no desire to pursue it practically.

In some sense, programs like Dev Bootcamp and traditional education start on the path of knowledge from opposite ends. In the middle lies experience (that mystical thing people say I will have one day).

Having started on each end of this path exactly once (on a large scale anyway), I don't know if they hold any gravity, but, in my experience, learning practically by "hacking out some web apps in Ruby on Rails" left me hungry to understand software engineering while learning theoretically about investment strategies and real estate markets left me with a bad taste in my mouth.