[ringdabell]

perhaps, but you have a ton of people going through 10 week crash course "learn how to program" courses and pulling down decent jr dev jobs.

there's a whole cottage industry around this, see: starterleague.com

basic html+css with some passing familiarity with Rails/Jquery and some common libraries = 80K, $100/hour programmer bro.

not too far off from '99...

[jurassic]

Meh, there is a wide variety of rigor and selectivity in these programs. While I admit there are a lot of junk grads from junk programs right now, hiring from the top third/half of the more selective bootcamp programs (e.g. App Academy which requires no upfront payment, ~10% acceptance rate, 10% attrition, taught by an ex-googler) and you'll find people who are ready to start implementing features and adding value to your business without a lot of handholding. You'll find people from other technical backgrounds, who wanted to learn web development in an intensive environment. You'll find people from very good universities. You'll find people who have demonstrated ability to work long hours and ramp up quickly. And they're the kind of people who believe enough in themselves to go all-in, often quitting jobs and moving across the country with their life savings to learn how to build things for the web.

Bootcampers lack the mathematical rigor of fresh CS grads, but most of the value in web products doesn't come from writing proofs or optimizing algorithms. And if bootcampers are creating value, I don't see why they shouldn't be compensated appropriately. The market seems to agree, since these people are getting hired.

[groby_b]

> The market seems to agree, since these people are getting hired.

Not to take away from most of the rest of your statement, but remembering 1999, I'd like to point out that the market is dumb as a bag of hammers. The only thing it excels in is short-term profit maximization.

Nothing wrong with that, if that's your goal. But if you plan on a business that lasts a bit longer, you might want to ignore "the market" in determining if people add value.

[encoderer]

Define "ton".

It's not as many as you think. I'd guess it's measured in hundreds? Possibly low-thousands? And not everybody in these courses is a beginner, and they're not all trying land a software engineering job. Of the 3 people I personally know who've enrolled at App Academy et al, 1 is an experienced BE developer who wanted an accelerated immersion class in app development, 1 is a product manager who wants to pick up more programming skills to make him a better startup founder, and one legitimately was a beginner who wanted to land a software engineering job. So far, a couple months after successful completion, she hasn't had any offers yet.