These people are getting hired as programmers? To do what?
In that field, it seems typical to have both engineers and technicians working on projects. Engineers are responsible for design, and have degrees; Technicians do assembly and maintenance, and only need on-the-job training.
I’ve often wondered what our industry would look like if we adopted a similar distinction. In which case, bootcamp graduates would be a natural fit for a technician role.
For software development, you don't need math. This may change when data science is taken more serious and companies have to guarantee the quality of the derived knowledge. So it's the other way round. When our industry changes, we will adopt a similar distinction.
Software doesn't need math because testing is enough. Unlike physical objects, it doesn't cost much to test software, especially because reproduction is almost free. Additionally, with SaaS, software doesn't run unsupervised and thus there is constant testing. In that environment software can almost always be adjusted and reproduced when there are problems.
You can produce value long before you understand everything there is to know, of course, and a lot of being a software engineer is being able to problem solve on the job.
BloomTech exists to help people get to the point they can do that and create value. No school can pretend to teach everything there possibly could be to know about how software works.
That's an absolute minimum six months full-time (and a lot of students spen dmore than 40 hours/week) with no breaks; longer hour for hour than the time in a CS degree spent on software-related topics (though those vary far more widely than most of us like to pretend).
If you eliminate context switching, have the right tooling and instruction, yeah you aren't coming out the other side a principal engineer, but you can certainly build stuff, contribute to code the right way on teams, understand data structures and algorithms enough to make stuff performant, problem solve and build a whole lot of stuff and a lot of value.
That's enough to start getting paid, and 30 years later you can continue to marvel at how you're still just scratching the surface.
That's kind of beautiful, actually.
I helped run a large school for 6 years with 4,000 students/year who took an 850 hour program. Sad to say that amount of training isn't necessarily as much as it sounds.
In all seriousness, considering the amount of bootcamp grads now at all (yes all) levels of the industry, this is an out of touch take. They're getting hired to work hard at entry level software engineering jobs, and most of them quickly move beyond that.
I'll grant that possibility. Also, my anecdata isn't an objective truth right? But I can only judge by what I know and have seen. I wouldn't hire myself at my 2 year mark, all I could produce then by my standards now is a bunch of code I'd have to fix. I've had the same experience with junior developers I've hired.
Maybe these bootcamp grads are great, I haven't hired them because of the issue I raised so I don't actually know.
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/the-grace-hopper-divi...