If this program only selected 10% of the applicants, I am sure that they chose the top 10% that would have succeeded anyways. I would be more impressed if they were less selective in their admissions process.
I'm one of the cohorts/graduates. Shereef didn't screen us on technical skill and experience, he screened us on passion and determination. I agree that everyone in our class would have been successful without Dev Bootcamp, but not necessarily as developers. But even those of us who would have been developers without DBC I suspect that journey was sped up by many months. But that's not really the most important value of DBC in my opinion. Shereef helped me improve how I learn in general and overcome some personal blocks I had to being a better professional, and I think others experienced similar intangibles. It also gave me two months of incredible memories with an amazing group of people which I'll always value and never forget.
I think a slight clarification would be in order here: motivation and attitude are huge weighting factors in our selection process, but another important part is that we feel you can learn enough in ten weeks to be able to get a job. This doesn't require any programming skill, and the bulk of our students have little to none, but we definitely look for problem solving ability. Anyone can learn to code, everyone should. Just not everybody can learn it in ten weeks. As we nail down the curriculum and improve our teaching we'll probably take on more challenging students, and move closer to the goal of assessing students based on attitude alone.