[comatose_kid]

What do people think about an alternate path - read a few good books, create something useful on a github page?

My hiring bias skews towards people with a good engineering background or concrete examples of meaningful contributions to non-trivial coding projects.

Sure, vocational school is fine while demand for programmers is outstripping supply. But those who lived thru 1999 and the resulting downturn have seen that these things can turn on a dime and a 6-month certificate may not provide much job security.

[mgirdley]

In my experience, this works for only a very small minority of people. Most everyone else is lacking self-teaching skills or motivation to teach themselves enough to be hireable.

[enraged_camel]

As a self-taught developer, I struggled with accepting that people like me are a minority.

For a long time I could not wrap my mind around why people did not put in the effort to learn new skills on their own. Eventually I realized that the reason is simple: they can't. Like you say, they either don't have the self-teaching skills or the motivation to follow through on the endeavor. I would be talking to friends and they would say, "I want to learn X so I'm thinking of taking classes at the local college." I would think to myself, "that's so silly, they should just buy a bunch of books for one tenth the price!" Because that's what I would have done. As time went on though I realized most people need someone to teach them stuff. They either never developed self-teaching skills, or let those skills erode throughout high school and college due to neglect. Maybe that's a commentary on our education system: it's too focused on spoon-feeding facts (and then test on those facts) and does not put enough emphasis on self-reliance.

[yummyfajitas]

I pretty much want to stick to this minority in hiring. I don't know how to get useful work out of anyone else.

Given a development role, how do you get someone who needs hand holding to be worth their salary? Just hire a lot of manager/mentors and resign yourself to being a large team? Or something else?

[mgirdley]

I recommend people hiring bootcamp grads to sit them next to a senior dev. There's 1-2 times a day that 5 minutes of mentoring will save them hours.