[doomspork]

You're going to find good people in any group but they'll likely be the same people who would have learned it on their own without the course work because they're self starters and motivated.

That said, after attending a dozen or more of these hiring events I must admit that the quality is abysmally low. Two of my previous employers decided to hire our entry-level engineers from these "bootcamps" and 6 months later all of them had been fired for poor performance, even after weeks of mentorship and coaching. In my experience the amount of handholding was far greater than the work they could do on their own. I can recall helping people with basic command line navigation, simple git commands, and even things like running rspec. Trivial tasks that should form the foundation of your work as a software engineer required almost constant support.

My personal take is that these schools are great in that they encourage people to pursue engineering but I fear that just like other trade schools (e.g. ITT), it's offer a promise of a big paying job without adequately preparing people for the career ahead.