It looks not like 1999 at all. In 1999 one can easily find a programming job only knowing html. Today It seems that tons of graduates knowing very well Big O complexities, all kinds of cs fundamental algorithms still need to compete for a job.
The cream of that crop graduates to writing buggy and crashy IOS and Android apps.
The very elite (ya know the ones that passed calculus and linear algebra) of that esteemed crowd sits through a few Coursera and/or Udacity courses and proclaim themselves data scientists.
All of this has happened before and will happen again.
PS Absolutely loving what this is doing to total compensation though.
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...
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.
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.
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.