Agreed, it's an arrogant and condescending comment that does not belong on HN let alone at the top. It's sad.
Arrogant and condescending don’t mean “wrong”. Djikstra (the king of accusations of arrogance), once pointed out that his native language has no word for “egghead”: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/E..., principally because his native culture has no history of dismissing the educated. OP is using (I interpret) “bootcamp data scientists” as a shorthand for people who know far less than they think they do. That seems like a fair characterization, honestly: that’s entirely the philosophy behind bootcamps in the first place.
The idea behind them is that a four-year education in computer science is unnecessary for routine software development jobs, and one can be trained up to useful programming ability in a much shorter time (and less cost) than a full-blown university education takes. While it’s difficult to say how true this is, OP (I interpret) and I have both observed that bootcamp types seem to presume that a few-month intensive bootcamp experience actually does cover everything that a four-year degree does, and are often surprised (as well as defensive) when they come across something that their bootcamp didn’t prepare them for.
A close analogue would be a paralegal thinking they know the law better than lawyers or nurses thinking they know medicine better than doctors - not that they don’t know a lot, but there are a few things that, while not as commonly useful, do come up in actual practice that are important when they do.
I can run circles around some programmers with a CS degree.
CS degrees have always been an odd qualification, mainly because so much of it is completely unrelated to professional programming. You can get a high mark and still be unable to write a non-trivial program on your own.
When I originally started doing my Chemistry degree, we did huge amounts of lab work compared to the odd class or two CS students did.
You don't come out of uni a good progammer if you study CS, while you will come out of uni a good chemist, biologist or engineer.
And that really sums up the problem with this line of argument.
Do you think that this is untrue of boot camps?
And you're not going to be able to pass it because you can pontificate at length about compiler design or explain what a linked list is, but flunked the practicals because none of your code even compiled.
One guy I worked with a long time ago that we hired would give us all these huge lectures about the right DB design and when to use structs or classes. Had an opinion on the right way to do everything. But he didn't seem to be clearing many bugs, and then our company fired him after 3 months when they realized in his main project to get our dropbox-esque system talking with Word he'd written a whole 10 lines of code.
Could talk the talk, but couldn't walk the walk.
They represent an infinitesimal minority of the population. Most people, even people with CS degrees lack that discipline. At least the CS degree forces them to learn some fundamentals so that they can potentially understand what they're looking at and learn on the job, and demonstrates at least a moderate interest in the subject as a vocation.
In my experience most people who graduate from bootcamps (in general, some are better than others) are all about getting a job as soon as possible. They're expecting a 6 figure salary within a year, and are willing/able to put in 70+ hour weeks for a few months to get there. Not knocking that perspective, but they'll lack a lot of background outside of their very specific niche and will likely be less adaptable, particularly on any highly technical subjects where some level of theory is required.
IMO the wave of "Software Engineering" degrees that are trickling out into the universities are probably the ideal. Full 4 year accredited degree that focuses on practical software development and less on the theory and mathematics. Let the CS-degrees focus on research/academics in the fashion of schools of Arts and Science and leave the Engineering to the Engineering schools.
I had on average about one lab class a semester as a Biochemist, and on average one programming class a semester as a CS. You couldn't pass the CS class without being able to write code that worked and got more complicated by the end of the semester. By no means did this mean I (or anyone else) was an awesome software engineer by virtue of doing the degree, but I'd put almost anyone with a decent grade from my undergrad program into an entry level position. Same deal with Chemists or Biochemists. I've done a bunch of hiring and can say often bootcamp grads are less able to come up with a sophisticated answer to a problem they haven't studied before.
I say this also as a grad of Insight, a DS bootcamp of sorts.